I cast around rather wildly to find background reading for a recent week in Berlin. Friends loaned or gave us novels, guidebooks, recommendations. Beloved Husband settled on a massive history of Prussia called The Iron Kingdom and I spent a lot of time with a biography of the Krupp family (which I may or may not finish). And of course I have read Philip Kerr’s “March Violets” series about Bernie Gunther so I loaded his If the Dead Rise Not onto the Kindle. But when that story lurched to Cuba I lost interest. And once I actually got to Berlin, what I found most gripping was Marie Vassilitchikov’s Berlin Diaries 1940-1945.
Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, with new spire built in the 1960s.
Marie, or “Missie” as everyone calls her, was not a professional author. The book was put together by her brother after her death, using her diaries and letters. But she was a good observer and a clear, vivid writer. Born a Russian princess in 1917, she arrived in Berlin in 1940 to get a job. Her parents and younger siblings were living on their Lithuanian estates but had lost a great deal in the Revolution. Missie and her elder sister Tatiana were the only family members capable of earning money and Berlin was one of the few cities in Europe where, as stateless individuals, they could find employment.
What timing! At first this is a madcap narrative populated with young aristocrats from every corner of central Europe, all of whom seem to be related. Missie works as a secretary for the German Foreign Office but her social life is her real vocation. And then we have a front row seat as the war surges closer. Her family is separated, with a sister in Italy and a brother in Paris. Nazi policies become more and more frightening — and then, in 1943, the bombing starts.
The morning after the first raid I had an appointment to try on a hat at a small neighborhood shop. All around the houses were burning, but I wanted that hat badly and so I now went over and rang the bell and, wonder of wonders, was met by a smiling saleswoman: … ‘Your Highness may try it on.’
That’s her last act before leaving town because the house she was living in had been bombed. And then it keeps going, worse and worse. The light-hearted tone darkens. Missie is involved — to what extent, we never quite know — in the famous “Valkyrie” plot to assassinate Hitler. Many of her friends are arrested and never seen again. And between November 1943 and April 1945 Berlin was bombed 24 times. Some 92% of its buildings were destroyed. Which is why you still see the occasional empty lot on a major street in Berlin, and why some charred ruins still punctuate the skyline. This is not a world I know first-hand, but Missie did, and we’re lucky she shared her memories.
Book Group of One 
My mother, a child in Germany during the war with incredibly vivid memories of bombings, describes how life went on relatively normally in between. People still bought hats and tried to live as they always had. The photo you selected is haunting, isn’t it? Such a contrast in architectural styles. So much lost in those bombings, Berlin and elsewhere.
It’s such a gulf, isn’t it? Between your mother’s experience and ours? Our next-door neighbor had the same experience. She sometimes wore a pretty emerald ring that her father had traded some food for in the very bad period after the war ended. She was very tight-lipped about that. And really, it is unimaginable to me.