Marta Hillers

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Marta Hillers (1911–2001) was a German journalist and the author of the autobiographical Eine Frau in Berlin, her diary from 20 April to 22 June 1945 in Berlin during the Battle of Berlin. The book details her experiences as rape victim during the Red Army occupation.

She studied at the Sorbonne, and later travelled extensively throughout Europe. She spoke French and Russian in addition to her native German. In 1945, she found herself in Berlin, and had to accommodate elements of the Red Army as they took control of Berlin.

Marta Hillers's memoirs were first published in 1954 in English, anonymously. After the war, she circulated her diary among friends. The diary was written at first during the fall of Berlin, and it is not known to what extent it had been revised in the years immediately afterwards. One acquaintance, German author Kurt Marek, recognised its propaganda value at a time of rising Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, and therefore had it published in the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Hillers married in the 1950s, moved to Switzerland, abandoning journalism, but not before republishing her memoirs in German in 1959. However, this was in French-speaking Geneva, where Hillers had now settled. The memoirs were met with controversy, given the propaganda value at a time of ever greater Cold War tensions. However, the memoirs did not sell well, maybe because it was felt that Hillers's work brought shame on German women, or maybe because it did not strike an emotional chord with readers at the time, or else because the criticism of Russian soldiers was felt to be exaggerated.

Marta Hillers was never in the public eye, not agreeing to a new edition in her lifetime, after she was accused of besmirching the honour of German women, or of stirring anti-Communist propaganda.

It was only after Hillers's death in June 2001 at the age of 90 that Eine Frau in Berlin could be published again. It became a bestseller in 2003, given the stronger interest sixty years on in social conditions at the time. By that time, the idea had become popular that Germans were not only aggressors, but also—to a previously unrecognised extent—victims during World War II.

A Woman in Berlin was Marta Hillers's only major work.

[edit] Works

Eine Frau in Berlin, diary from 20 April to 22 June 1945, Die Andere Bibliothek Band Nr. 221, ISBN 3-8218-4534-1
A Woman in Berlin, paperback 320 pages, Virago Press Ltd, ISBN 1-84408-112-5