Rape
The Narrator explores the significance and impact of rape on her life throughout "A Woman in Berlin". Throughout all of her rapes, she clearly describes suffering and numbness and anger. However, she "laugh[s] at the face of lamentation" and says that she is alive and that life goes on when the Widow apologizes for not intervening enough.[11] She contemplates after and realizes that her previous fear of the word "rape" has disappeared. After being raped she comes to the realization that it is not the worst thing in the world despite typical beliefs. Nevertheless, the Narrator reveals a feeling of uncleanliness and repulsion at her own skin after being raped by so many men.[12] The Narrator also broods on her consensual sexual relationships that she has with Anatol and then the Major. She mentions that "By no means could it be said that the major is raping me" and that she is "placing [herself] at his service of [her] own accord".[13] She definitely does not think that she is doing it for love, and she scorns at the way the term has become a weak and empty term. She agrees that to some extent she does it for the "bacon, butter, sugar, candles, canned meat" that the major supplies and she considers the idea that she is a whore.[14] While she does not have any objections towards prostitution, she acknowledges that she would never be in this situation in peacetime and concludes that this consensual sexual relationship is one that while it resembles prostitution, it is only morally acceptable for herself in the circumstance of war.
Deutsche Welle noted that the book shows "for many women the end of the war did not bring peace as the physical and mental scars remained fresh was something the author realized when her boyfriend returned from the war. 'For him I've been spoiled once and for all,' she stated soberly, when despite all the joy of reunion, she remained 'ice cold' in bed." The different experiences of women and men created a postwar divide.[7]
Harvard Law professor Janet Halley wrote, "Not surprisingly, it is typical to read A Woman in Berlin as a story about rape. However, there is another way to read this text: as a book about the complete destruction of the Woman’s social world and its gradual, halting, and, by the end, only partial replacement by a new one. On this reading, rape is immersed into the fact of national collapse, wartime defeat; rape is an element of her world but not its metonym and certainly not its totality."[3]
