{"id":41893,"date":"2026-03-17T12:13:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-17T12:13:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/41893\/"},"modified":"2026-03-17T12:13:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-17T12:13:11","slug":"stay-alive-berlin-1939-1945-paints-a-vivid-portrait-of-a-city-under-moral-financial-and-military-siege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/41893\/","title":{"rendered":"Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 paints a vivid portrait of a city under moral, financial, and military siege"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a>Title:\u00a0Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945Author:\u00a0Ian BurumaGenre:\u00a0Non-FictionPublisher:\u00a0Penguin PressPages:\u00a0400<\/p>\n

Berlin is the subject of unusual historic interest. During the Weimar Republic period between the two world wars, it was a place of cultural daring, social experimentation, artistic ferment and artistic innovation. During the Cold War it was the epicentre of East-West tensions, the site of the Berlin airlift, the Berlin Wall and John F. Kennedy\u2019s famous \u201cIch bin ein Berliner\u201d pronouncement. But the Berlin of the most mystery, and perhaps the most consequence, may be the Berlin of the years of the Second World War.<\/p>\n

It was Adolf Hitler\u2019s capital. It was the staging ground for the terror that came with Nazi roundups, forced labour and rail transit to concentration camps. It was the target of Allied bombers and Soviet ground troops. It was where the violent reaction to the Great War of 1914-1918 was planned, where a great city was transformed, where a great cultural transformation was set in motion, and where great privations, great cruelty and great courage were the daily fare. <\/p>\n

The professor and prolific writer Ian Buruma was drawn to examining wartime Berlin because his father, a Dutchman pressed into factory work producing brakes and machine guns, lived and toiled there from 1943 to 1945. The result is Stay Alive, a vivid portrait of a city under moral, then financial, and finally military, siege. Life there slowed down, not because it became more leisurely but because quotidian tasks like assembling the elements of a meal became increasingly challenging. But wartime Berlin also was where life hurried up, because the stakes were so great and events moved so swiftly. The divisions globally \u2013 Allies versus Axis \u2013 were accompanied by divisions within the city.<\/p>\n

The book, an important contribution to our understanding of the war, takes its title from the Berlin goodbye common in the period, bleiben Sie \u00fcbrig, or \u201cstay alive,\u201d with a meaning far different from the 1977 Bee Gees song prominent in the film Saturday Night Fever. The wartime version was one part admonition, one part hope \u2013 and one part sad and sober recognition of the great task facing all Berliners, most especially but not exclusively Jews and others \u2013 such as those with disabilities, LGBTQ people and dissidents \u2013 not deemed sufficiently \u201cpure.\u201d <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Ian Buruma.Penguin Random House Canada\/Supplied<\/p>\n

To be sure, there were scattered pockets of resistance to the Nazis, part of it coming through the arts, especially music. The German jazz musician Coco Schumann spoke of Germans who \u201ctried to stay stylishly above our bad times\u201d while cocooned in what he called \u201cour small unreal country world in the midst of war.\u201d People danced to Pennies from Heaven, made famous by Bing Crosby, before the destruction that came from on high wreaked havoc. Indeed, dancing takes a surprisingly prominent place in this chronicle; as the war ground on, permission for Berliners to dance was periodically given, and then forbidden, for no apparent reason \u2013 and then restored again. <\/p>\n

But tightening food restrictions and worrying reports from the Eastern Front left many Berliners deeply unsettled. Then the departures began, in rail cars and furniture-delivery vans, to the Warsaw or Riga ghettoes, or to Auschwitz. Buruma\u2019s aunt recalled travelling while wearing 14 layers of clothes, a tactic that allowed her to survive the Theresienstadt camp. One soldier, back in Berlin on leave from the combat, surveyed the horror and said, \u201cWhat shadows darken our times.\u201d <\/p>\n

The danger grew with the appearance of British aircraft in the Berlin skies, first dropping propaganda leaflets, then bombs. The result was a \u201cBerlin pessimism\u201d that Buruma describes with piercing understatement: \u201cLife was getting harder. Fear of a menacing future was one thing. The increasing hardship of daily life in the capital was acute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came the alternating air raids, American Flying Fortresses by day, British Lancasters by night, a kind of tag-team of terror. \u201cIf it wasn\u2019t the air-raid alarms that deprived him of sleep,\u201d Buruma wrote of his father, \u201cit was the maddening nightly raids from fleas and lice crawling and jumping from the wooden barrack walls.\u201d <\/p>\n

As the assaults from the air, relentless and unforgiving, continued, and as Berliners became schooled in the different sounds of aerial bombardment, strains came in two dimensions. \u201cAt least some people, perhaps many, felt more and more squeezed between the violence raining down on them day and night from the air and the brutality of the Nazi state,\u201d he writes. Then came a brutal transformation in fear: the vengeance of Soviet troops moving inexorably toward Berlin. <\/p>\n

Still, the Hitler inner circle pressed on. \u201cPeople were forced to carry on with the war, to endure, to obey, to resist, \u2018until the last house has been reduced to rubble,\u2019\u201d he writes. <\/p>\n

Washington during the war years was the subject of a popular book by the NBC broadcaster David Brinkley. Paris during the war was the subject of several books, most especially Is Paris Burning?, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, which later was made into a film whose screenplay was written by, among others, Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola. Books about London during the war number in the hundreds, including the recent The Splendid and the Vile, by Erik Larson. Berlin now has its authoritative, and deeply personal, volume. It is a terrific story about a terrible time, and a terrible place. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery:Title:\u00a0Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945Author:\u00a0Ian BurumaGenre:\u00a0Non-FictionPublisher:\u00a0Penguin PressPages:\u00a0400 Berlin is the subject of unusual historic interest.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":41894,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[99],"tags":[112,190,7656],"class_list":["post-41893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-berlin","tag-berlin","tag-germany","tag-noastack"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116244460562625411","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}