Editorial Content for Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
In his fascinating new book, STAY ALIVE, Ian Buruma says he became interested in what life was like in Berlin during World War II when he came across his father's papers and realized how many different strata there were in the city during that time. When his father refused to sign a loyalty oath, he was forced to move from the Netherlands to Germany to work in a factory. Like many others, he then had to find his own balance between survival and resistance.
Along with reading diaries and published accounts of what it was like to live in Berlin from the mid-1930s to the end of the war, Buruma interviewed survivors, a population that is fast disappearing. What he learned was that many people survived by either focusing on pleasure and comforts or by ignoring what was going on around them. Or both. Most people in wartime Berlin were "neither cynics, nor bullies, nor ideological fanatics; they simply conformed." His words are clearly aimed at the contemporary political landscape, as he warns of the "temptation to look away" while the autocrats take over.
"Ian Buruma expertly widens his lens on the effects of the war in order to describe what was happening on the larger screen, as well as explaining what the aftermath meant for Germany and the world."
When an attempted assassination of Hitler and the accompanying coup failed, Leo wrote to a friend to explain why he hadn't mentioned it earlier: "The reason is that it hardly made any impression here. We are immune to any sensation these days."
Buruma is particularly interested in exploring what daily life was like for everyone, from the Poles and other oppressed groups to the average Berliner, as well as the National Socialists (Nazis). The Jews were in their own category. However, depending on whether both parents were Jewish, or a Jew had married a gentile, or the family had friends in high places, their treatment greatly differed. He also talks about those who left for political reasons, like Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, as well as those who stayed because of loyalty to their country. In addition, there were oppressive exit taxes for Jewish residents that made emigration expensive. Many, however, were (or claimed to be) "unpolitisch."
By 1945, very little of the basic comforts existed, and the restraint that most Germans exhibited in talking about Hitler receded. However, the punishment for those caught criticizing the regime or deserting --- even if old or injured --- was horrific. Men were chained to lampposts until they died from the tight bonds and the cold. Jews in mixed marriages were forced to clear bomb sites and collect corpses. Meanwhile, the populace had little in the way of food or heating, and schools were closed. People waited for an invasion of Soviets or Americans.
Ian Buruma expertly widens his lens on the effects of the war in order to describe what was happening on the larger screen, as well as explaining what the aftermath meant for Germany and the world. STAY ALIVE wraps up with the creation of the United Nations and the largely unrealized idealism behind that organization.
Teaser
In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, STAY ALIVE is a study in extremes --- depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism.
Promo
In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, STAY ALIVE is a study in extremes --- depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism.
About the Book
An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city’s descent into utter annihilation.
In 1939, when Ian Buruma’s epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse.
Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, the book is a study in extremes --- depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism.
By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not “Auf wiedersehen” or “Heil Hitler” but “Bleiben Sie übrig” --- “Stay alive.” And by war’s end Berlin’s population had fallen by almost half.
Among the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Buruma’s own father, a Dutch student conscripted into forced labor in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers. Buruma gives due weight to his and their experiences, which give the book a special added dimension. This is a book full of tenderness and genuine heroism, but it is by no means sentimental: again and again we see that most people do not do the hard thing most of the time. Most people go along. It’s a lesson that has not lost its timeliness.
Audiobook available, read by Ian Buruma
