A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City By Anonymous Metropolitan, 261 pp., $23 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

In East Germany, World War II's coda—a Soviet raping spree—provoked national shushing. Upon publication in Germany in 1959, the diary was assailed for sullying the honor of the country's women. Now reissued in English as A Woman in Berlin, the book should be embraced for the reason it was initially faulted. Its frank documentation of German suffering—the hunger and uncertainty as well as the widespread rape—illuminates a subject whose worldwide taboo is just beginning to subside.

Violated by a series of "Ivans," the diarist resolved to latch onto a high-ranking officer with the grim ambition of choosing her rapist. The Russians in this account clearly regarded sex as war booty, not as a weapon; some even made ridiculous courting gestures and offers of remuneration for their pleasure. The author and a friend exact their small revenge by declaring the Soviets bad in bed. "Maybe they have the latest in socialist planned economies," her friend concludes, "but when it comes to matters erotic they're still with Adam and Eve."

Unflinchingly honest, the chronicle also sheds light on lingering questions about civilians under the Third Reich. For all her sophistication, the diarist was hardly a staunch dissident. Amid the suddenly trendy Hitler-bashing, she pauses to ask herself, "Was I for . . . or against? What's clear is that I was there, that I breathed what was in the air, and it affected all of us, even if we didn't want it to."