Theodor Plievier's (1892-1955) Berlin (1954) is the third volume of his World War II trilogy. Here, as in the other two books, Plievier chooses the panoramic view of events, the collapse of the city as viewed from the perspectives of Hitler's bunker, the officers and soldiers ordered to fight to the death, and German civilians, enduring pitiless shelling and bombing, desperate at the prospect of the Russian army's pillage and rape of the city. It is the latter view that dominates the novel, although some of the most compelling scenes take place within the bunker.

Pliever employs the technique of a range of perspectives interspersed with one another to build a sense of the whole from the concrete depiction of individual stories. One story concerns a doctor picking his way through the relentless bombardment looking for his wife, who has been raped and carried off in a Russian tank. The wife, Dolores Linth, confined in the bottom of the tank, becomes the exclusive property of the tank's commander until he is killed. At that point she is brutally raped by another one of the crew. She escapes but suffers serious physical and psychological damage; eventually her husband recovers her dead body. Thus the total terror with which the German civilians anticipate the Russian army proves to be not unreasonable. The whirligig of time brings in its revenge as the Russians, remembering German atrocities during the 1941 invasion, retaliate brutally, spurred on by a government exhorting them to loot, rampage, and, particularly, "to destroy the pride of Teutonic women."

Standing out from the many memorable scenes in the bunker is the portrait of the exhausted "restless corpse, Uncle Adolph, . . . with nothing left to murder," hosting a tea party for Joseph Goebbels's five beautiful blond children. Within a week, these children will be poisoned by their parents, who will then commit suicide.

From this world in ruin, Plievier carries his story into the postwar era. Here it loses much of its force and focus. But the heart of the book is memorable for its devastating account of the fall of the city.

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