Chapter 166: Berlin Summary and Analysis
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
In January 1945, Frau Elena and four girls—the Gerlitz twins, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are shipped from Essen to Berlin to disassemble forging presses in a machine-parts factory. They live above a shuttered printing company and burn misprinted dictionaries for warmth. Nightly bombing raids turn the city to rubble; on the walk to work Jutta sees corpses that look asleep and three dead children with backpacks. She recalls the two letters that announced her brother Werner’s death at La Fresnais and Cherbourg. The factory padlocks in late March, and the girls are reassigned to clearing broken masonry and glass from bombed streets. In a rare moment of grace, Claudia finds a bakery box with fifteen strawberry pastries, which the group shares. By April, rumors of the approaching Russians fill the air. In May, three Russian soldiers break into the apartment. Frau Elena tries to shield the girls, then leads the two youngest soldiers into another room. The officer rapes Jutta while murmuring names—Kirill, Pavel, Afanasy, Valentin—that she later believes were dead comrades. Before leaving, the youngest fires twice into the ceiling. Frau Elena zips her ski jacket and rubs her arm, trying to warm one small part of herself.
Key Events
- Relocation to Berlin (January 1945): Frau Elena and four girls—twins Hannah and Susanne Gerlitz, Claudia Förster, and fifteen-year-old Jutta Pfennig—are moved from Essen to Berlin to work in a machine-parts factory.
- Factory labor: Ten hours a day, six days a week, they disassemble massive forging presses and crate the metal for trains.
- Living conditions: They reside above an abandoned printing company, burning pages from crates of misprinted dictionaries in a potbelly stove.
- Nightly bombing: Bombers come every single night through spring, trying to burn the city to its roots.
- Grim discoveries: Jutta sees mummified corpses, people with no visible injuries, and three facedown children with backpacks—and briefly considers whether the children might have food.
- Reading letters for illiterate girls: Jutta reads letters from boyfriends, brothers, or fathers at the front and writes responses for those who cannot read or write.
- Werner’s death recalled: Jutta received two letters announcing Werner’s death, each giving a different burial place (La Fresnais, Cherbourg).
- Factory closure (late March): The machine-parts factory padlocks; the girls are sent to clean streets after bombings, lifting masonry and shoveling dust.
- Deserters shot: Jutta hears about terrified sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys dragged from attics and executed in the street.
- The pastries: Claudia Förster finds a paper bakery box with fifteen strawberry pastries; the five women eat three each, sharing a moment of giddy joy.
- Rumors of Russians (April): Women speak only of the Russians—barbarians, Tatars, savages. Jutta hears that grandmothers rub granddaughters with feces or cut off their hair to make them less appealing.
- The Russian assault (May): Three Russian soldiers break in. Frau Elena tells the girls to stay calm and close their eyes; Jutta insists on keeping hers open. Frau Elena leads the two youngest soldiers into another room. Claudia goes next. The officer rapes Jutta while reciting names. The youngest fires into the ceiling twice before they leave.
Character Development
Jutta Pfennig
Jutta transitions from a schoolgirl into a hardened survivor. She reads letters for illiterate coworkers, writes poetic responses, and stoically endures the nightly bombings and the sight of corpses. Her whispered “Werner” shows that grief remains raw, but she suppresses it. During the assault, she refuses to close her eyes—a quiet act of defiance—and later tries to assign meaning to the officer’s murmured words, deciding they were names of dead soldiers. This mental reframing suggests she is trying to preserve her own humanity by making sense of the brutality.
Frau Elena
Once a caregiver at Children’s House, Frau Elena now wears a torn ski jacket and mutters French songs. She shields the girls as best she can: she leads the youngest soldiers into another room so they target her first, hoping to make the others “gentler.” Afterward, she zips her parka and rubs a single arm—a gesture that conveys both numbness and an attempt to reclaim one small piece of herself.
Claudia Förster
Claudia stops speaking entirely for whole days. Yet in a moment of unexpected agency, she finds the pastry box and shares it—a silent but powerful act of generosity that briefly restores a sense of the “unfallen world.” During the assault, she offers only moans, emphasizing how war has stripped her of language.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
Language and Memory
The burning dictionary pages (yesterday Dankeswort; today Frauenwahlrecht) symbolize the destruction of German language and culture alongside its cities. Jutta’s act of reading and writing letters for illiterate girls preserves memory and connection. The officer’s murmured names—Kirill, Pavel, Afanasy, Valentin—are fragments that Jutta later interprets as dead soldiers, another form of memorialization.
The “Unfallen World”
The pastry box is described as “something from the unfallen world”—a rare artifact of prewar innocence. The shared feast, with powdered sugar on noses and jelly between teeth, represents a fleeting return to childhood joy. That Claudia, “petrified” and mute, achieved this miracle underscores how small acts of goodness persist even in the last derelict stronghold.
The Destruction of Innocence
The fifteen-year-old girls are forced into adult labor, witness corpses, and are sexually violated. The Russian soldiers themselves are barely older (“sheepish schoolboys” turned “lunatics”), showing how war corrupts everyone it touches. Jutta’s memory of three dead children with backpacks—and her first thought being about food—demonstrates how survival instincts override natural empathy.
Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War
The chapter depicts rape as systematic and dehumanizing. Frau Elena’s methodical attempt to “go first” to make the others “gentler” reveals how women strategize to minimize harm. The officer’s detached recitation of names, coupled with the perfume-soaked young soldiers, portrays the assault as an act stripped of intimacy or passion—a cold, ritualized atrocity.
Why This Chapter Matters
Chapter 166 provides the devastating conclusion to Jutta’s storyline and illustrates the total cost of war on civilians. It confirms Werner’s death through Jutta’s memory of the two letters, linking her grief to the larger anti-war theme of the novel. The destruction of Berlin functions as a mirror to the earlier devastation of Saint-Malo, showing that no side is spared. The assault by Russian soldiers undercuts any simple narrative of “liberation” and forces readers to confront the sexual violence that accompanied the Red Army’s advance. Finally, the chapter’s closing image—Frau Elena rubbing her arm to warm one small part of herself—echoes the novel’s title and suggests that even after unspeakable horror, people cling to the light they can still feel.
Study Questions and Answers
1. Why does Jutta choose to keep her eyes open during the assault, and what does this reveal about her character?
Jutta wants to see, even when Frau Elena advises closing her eyes. This refusal to look away reflects Jutta’s determination to bear witness rather than retreat into denial. Throughout the novel, Jutta has questioned authority and sought the truth (the radio broadcasts, Werner’s letters). Keeping her eyes open is a continuation of that trait: she will not shield herself from reality, no matter how brutal. It also prepares her for the later memory work of trying to understand what the officer said, treating the event not as a blank trauma but as something she must process and perhaps assign meaning to.
2. What significance do the misprinted dictionaries and the pastries have as symbols in this chapter?
The dictionaries represent language, order, and cultural heritage being destroyed for fuel—literally burned page by page. The misprints (non-words like Dankeswort and Frauenvorsteher) suggest that the old certainties have broken down; language itself has become unreliable. The pastries, by contrast, are a perfect artifact from the “unfallen world”—intact, sweet, and communal. Together, they frame the chapter’s spectrum between total destruction and fleeting grace. The pastries also mirror the novel’s broader symbol of the sea of flames (destruction) versus the light that remains (small acts of kindness).
3. How does Jutta’s experience in Berlin connect to the novel’s larger themes of memory and survival?
Jutta’s memory of the two contradictory burial notices for Werner—La Fresnais, Cherbourg—exemplifies how war scrambles facts and leaves survivors with uncertainty. She later tries to reconstruct the officer’s words (Kirill, Pavel, Afanasy, Valentin), deciding they were names of dead soldiers “but she could be wrong.” This ambiguity echoes the novel’s insistence that memory is fragmentary and fallible, yet still worth preserving. Her survival strategy—not making a sound, keeping her eyes open, and later searching for meaning in the assault—demonstrates how people endure atrocity by holding onto their inner light, however small.