Hannelore Krollpfeiffer

We Lived in Berlin: A Story About the End of the War Hannelore Krollpfeiffer

Berlin, 1943. Ursula and her twin sister are in their early twenties, trying to get by in Nazi Germany during wartime. They are not brave, but they are determined. They are skeptical, at times cynical, but utterly complacent. They are more concerned with the fate of their prized record collection and their romantic flings than the fact that their Jewish neighbors disappear overnight. They are terrified by nightly air raids and less and less certain that the promised "Miracle Weapon" will bring about Germany's "Final Victory." They are not Nazis, but what are they? Who are they?

Hannelore Krollpfeiffer's "We lived in Berlin. A Story About the End of the War" is a chillingly honest, dispassionate yet moving, autobiographical account of the final days of World War II as seen through the eyes of two ordinary young women. When it was first published in 1947 by JHW Dietz in Berlin, the Jewish writer Karl Schnog, who survived multiple concentration camps, stated in his epilogue: "This matter-of-fact account offers an undistorted reflection of recent history-a mirror worth looking into." In 2007, the book was reissued by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag with a prologue by Michael Jürgs, a prominent German journalist and author, who noted that 60 years later, Krollpfeiffer resisted the temptation of adding to or changing her narrative, and instead, let it stand as it was when it was first written, from the laconic perspective of a young woman who survived. Now, 74 years after the book's debut, Krollpfeiffer's daughter, Katrin Ciaffa, has completed the first English translation.