Organized like a diary, with a section devoted to each year of the war. This structure lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints … Every so often, Stay Alive provides a glimpse of Berliners facing the kinds of hard choices that my grandmother felt lucky to have avoided … At the end of the book, Buruma characterizes his project as ‘partly a love letter to Berlin.’ This, he acknowledges, may sound perverse; the book is, explicitly and unrelentingly, about the Berlin of the war years, when, in his words, ‘unspeakable crimes were planned and perpetrated there’ … Elsewhere in the book’s final pages, Buruma offers a different account of his purpose, more along the lines of a warning … This is, or should be, the book’s claim to relevance, in which case not love but shame and terror would seem the pertinent emotions.
