A Woman in Berlin: The Movie
Apparently they've made a movie out of A Woman in Berlin. I'm just reeling at the idea that this is something people would want to watch, and cringing out of what is likely to have been made out of the various 'protector' relationships in the memoir.
I read A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City in 2005. It is a diary by an anonymous journalist who lived through Russian occupation of Berlin at the end of WWII. From my post at that time:
This is an amazing work, at last back in print. An intimate portrait of women's experience in occupied territory. Like All Quiet on the Western Front this is one of those books that doesn't depend on what side you were on; it is about human experience during war. A Woman in Berlin deals extensively with the use of rape as a conquering force. It sounds like something horrible to read, and for someone who was obsessed with WWII in my teens, it's strange to be returning to "familiar territory," but like Anne Frank's diary, what comes through is the powerful will to live.
Anonymous is dead now. Her diary was the source of such controversy when it was originally printed in the 50s, she would not agree to having it reprinted until she died. But it is an amazing work that really needs to be used as original source material in Women's Studies courses, and in Literature of War classes, which remain arrogantly free of women's narratives.
I still can't imagine it as a movie... or rather, I can imagine it all too well, and it's a movie I'm not sure I would be willing to see.
I read A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City in 2005. It is a diary by an anonymous journalist who lived through Russian occupation of Berlin at the end of WWII. From my post at that time:
This is an amazing work, at last back in print. An intimate portrait of women's experience in occupied territory. Like All Quiet on the Western Front this is one of those books that doesn't depend on what side you were on; it is about human experience during war. A Woman in Berlin deals extensively with the use of rape as a conquering force. It sounds like something horrible to read, and for someone who was obsessed with WWII in my teens, it's strange to be returning to "familiar territory," but like Anne Frank's diary, what comes through is the powerful will to live.
Anonymous is dead now. Her diary was the source of such controversy when it was originally printed in the 50s, she would not agree to having it reprinted until she died. But it is an amazing work that really needs to be used as original source material in Women's Studies courses, and in Literature of War classes, which remain arrogantly free of women's narratives.
I still can't imagine it as a movie... or rather, I can imagine it all too well, and it's a movie I'm not sure I would be willing to see.