In recent years, Ian Buruma, a regular contributor to Harper’s Magazine and The New Yorker, and author, among many other books, of The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II and Year Zero: A History of 1945 and Their Promised Land has “come to love Berlin.”
And Berliners are coming to terms with their past by displaying Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones” bearing the names of Jews, in front of the buildings where they lived, and signs identifying the most notorious torture chambers of the Third Reich. While some claim these markers of humanity’s “blackest depravity” are dispiriting, morbid, or evidence of unearned pride, Buruma endorses efforts to “look history in the face as an essential condition” for a city – and its people – to be reborn and live again. He may well be right.
To be sure, he writes, reunification has been accompanied by “neo-Nazi demagoguery.” And “the world is not done with dictators,” yet, once again, the city is a vibrant center of culture.
Germany invades Poland
In September 1939, Nicolaus Sombart’s high school principal announced that Germany had invaded Poland, made a patriotic speech, and cancelled classes. Nicolaus rushed home to share the news with his father, Werner Sombart, a distinguished academic. “Do you know what this means?,” the elder Sombart asked. “Of course,” Nicolaus replied. “It means victory.” Sombart shook his head. “It means the end of Germany.”
Meanwhile, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger declared that “world Jewry and international finance pushed us into a world war” that Germany must fight “mercilessly.”
In Stay Alive, Buruma draws on a wide array of sources, including Joseph Goebbels’ diaries, journalist William Shirer’s articles, letters written by Buruma’s father, a Dutch student forced to work in a factory in Berlin making brakes and machine guns, and interviews with several survivors, to take his readers into cafes, cinemas, apartments, assembly lines, and air-raid shelters to understand what the 4.3 million people in the city faced, felt, did and didn’t do between 1939 and 1945.
Stay Alive is cogent, candid, compassionate, and compelling.
That many Berliners initially went about their normal lives, in what some called Sitzkrieg, “seated war” Buruma writes, is disturbing but not surprising: “Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to hear or see.” And, of course, things weren’t at all normal. Listening to foreign radio stations was forbidden. Open resistance to the Nazis meant death. People worked longer hours. Food, clothing and other necessities could only be purchased with ration coupons.
Anyone with three Jewish parents was classified as “a full Jew.” Nazi officials disagreed about what to do with Mischling, those of “mixed race,” Jew and gentile. Jews lost their jobs, were forced to do hard labor, and “sell” their homes and valuables at a fraction of their worth. Ordered to wear a star, they were arrested at random and jailed until they bribed their way out. Jewish doctors and dentists were punished for treating Aryan patients. Jews could only shop between 4 and 5 p.m., when most items were sold out.
During air raids, they were confined to garbage rooms or provided no shelter at all. The tiny number of Jews who received permission to leave the country had to pay an exorbitant tax to get out.
Anticipation of an early end to the war following the surrender of France evaporated, Buruma notes, when the German army’s invasion of the Soviet Union bogged down and the United States entered the war. Between January and March 1942 almost 550,000 German soldiers were killed or wounded, bringing the total casualties to about 1 million.
The Allies were already bombing Berlin. Returning soldiers were telling Berliners about atrocities on the eastern front.
As Goebbels’ birthday present to Hitler, the vast majority of German Jews had been deported to concentration camps in eastern Europe. Although Buruma has doubts about estimates of the size of the crowd, he reveals that on one occasion Mischling spouses gathered outside a holding center demanding the release of their husbands. In 2023, the protest was featured in a movie titled Rosenstrasse.
It was no longer possible “to live in Berlin as a ‘full Jew.’” People throughout the city were “only too happy” to report Jews in their midst to the authorities. By the end of the war, only 2,000 had survived.
Along with readers of Stay Alive, Buruma wonders how many Berliners were aware of the fate of the Jews who were deported. A few, he points out, risked their lives to hide Jews, sometimes in their own homes or churches. But, after acknowledging that in dictatorships public opinion is hard to gauge, Buruma suggests that many people, “perhaps the majority,” felt “that they had enough on their minds and what was happening to the Jews was none of their business.” The “desire to look away,” he writes, “to pretend ignorance, to be willfully oblivious, must have been the norm.”
And some Berliners might tell themselves “that if the Germans had done bad things… the horrors inflicted by their enemies more than made up for them.” That sentiment was almost certainly reinforced by the vengeance visited on German soldiers and civilians by the Red Army in “the Battle of Berlin.”
Buruma notes as well that he has found no evidence “that most Germans” approved of the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. And “quite a few” disapproved of it. “Hitler may have been a monster,” he writes, “but one doesn’t murder the head of state, especially when the country is surrounded by enemies.”
The writer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945
By Ian Buruma
Penguin Press
400 pages; $32