Berlin Underground. Battleground Berlin

In her moving diaries, journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich (1901–1977) talks about resistance against the Nazi regime, the difficult everyday life during the war and the years that followed.

While Der Schattenmann, the diary from 1938 to April 1945, focused on a small resistance group in Berlin, the entries of the following three years document life in the destroyed capital of the Reich, from the liberation of Berlin by the Russians to the blockade in the winter of 1948/49. With great hopes, people throw themselves into the fight for survival, organise and clean up, set up cabarets and give their first concerts, but it becomes increasingly clear that for many reasons the chance for a real new beginning is missed. Berlin becomes a four-sector city and then, after the forced unification of the SPD and KPD into the SED in the eastern part, more and more a city divided in two. With almost prophetic intuition, the author notes: »It’s possible that from tomorrow we’ll have two city governments and a Chinese wall with battlements and watchtowers along the sector border.«

The first volume of Ruth Andreas-Friedrich’s dairies, Der Schattenmann, contains an afterword by Jörg Drews, in which a short account of the aid and resistance work of the group »Onkel Emil«, a document found in the Munich Institute of Contemporary History, is published for the first time.