Review: 'A Woman in Berlin'
Plot: After the fall of Berlin, a woman trades her body for protection from Red Army soldiers. In German and Russian with English subtitles.
Bottom line: A different kind of war story, told from an often unacknowledged perspective
Cast: Nina Hoss, Evgeny Sidikhin
Length: 2:11
'A Woman in Berlin'
Photo credit: Handout | Nina Hoss and Evgeny Sidikhin in "A Woman in Berlin"
'I can't say the major rapes me," the unnamed heroine of "A Woman in Berlin" writes in her diary. "I am at his disposal."
The difference, if there is one, defines this film, based on a supposedly true account of wartime rape credited to Anonyma and published in 1959. Nina Hoss plays the author, a journalist living in Berlin during the Russian invasion of 1945. Within days, women young and old begin greeting each other with a candid question: "How often?"
Anonyma, however, seeks protection - and a measure of control - in the arms of a Red Army major named Andrej (Evgeny Sidikhin). It is capitulation, but also survival. Inevitably, it becomes something deeper.
Hanging over "A Woman in Berlin" are the German atrocities against the Russians, spoken of but never seen, and the Holocaust, never mentioned. The war's end brings sighs of relief, though not to the author of the diary. "I fear," she writes, "that misfortune has a greater imagination."
