{"id":76972,"date":"2026-05-07T12:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T12:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/76972\/"},"modified":"2026-05-07T12:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T12:28:09","slug":"berliners-are-coming-to-terms-with-their-past-book-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/76972\/","title":{"rendered":"Berliners are coming to terms with their past – book review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, Ian Buruma, a regular contributor to Harper\u2019s 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 \u201ccome to love Berlin<\/a>.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

And Berliners are coming to terms with their past by displaying Stolpersteine, \u201cstumbling stones\u201d 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<\/a>. \u00a0While some claim these markers of humanity\u2019s \u201cblackest depravity\u201d are dispiriting, morbid, or evidence of unearned pride, Buruma endorses efforts to \u201clook history in the face as an essential condition\u201d for a city \u2013 and its people \u2013 to be reborn and live again. He may well be right.<\/p>\n

To be sure, he writes, reunification has been accompanied by \u201cneo-Nazi demagoguery.\u201d \u00a0And \u201cthe world is not done with dictators,\u201d yet, once again, the city is a vibrant center of culture.<\/p>\n

Germany invades Poland<\/p>\n

In September 1939, Nicolaus Sombart\u2019s high school principal announced that Germany<\/a> had invaded Poland<\/a>, made a patriotic speech, and cancelled classes. \u00a0Nicolaus rushed home to share the news with his father, Werner Sombart, a distinguished academic. \u00a0\u201cDo you know what this means?,\u201d the elder Sombart asked. \u00a0\u201cOf course,\u201d Nicolaus replied. \u00a0\u201cIt means victory.\u201d \u00a0Sombart shook his head. \u00a0\u201cIt means the end of Germany.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger declared that \u201cworld Jewry and international finance pushed us into a world war\u201d that Germany must fight \u201cmercilessly.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Stay Alive, Buruma draws on a wide array of sources, including Joseph Goebbels\u2019 diaries, journalist William Shirer\u2019s articles, letters written by Buruma\u2019s 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\u2019t do between 1939 and 1945.<\/p>\n

Stay Alive is cogent, candid, compassionate, and compelling.<\/p>\n

That many Berliners initially went about their normal lives, in what some called Sitzkrieg, “seated war” Buruma writes, is disturbing but not surprising: \u201cHuman beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don\u2019t wish to hear or see.\u201d \u00a0And, of course, things weren\u2019t at all normal. \u00a0Listening to foreign radio stations was forbidden. \u00a0Open resistance to the Nazis meant death. People worked longer hours. Food, clothing and other necessities could only be purchased with ration coupons.<\/p>\n

Anyone with three Jewish parents was classified as \u201ca full Jew.\u201d \u00a0Nazi officials disagreed about what to do with Mischling, those of \u201cmixed race,\u201d Jew and gentile. Jews lost their jobs, were forced to do hard labor, and \u201csell\u201d their homes and valuables at a fraction of their worth. \u00a0Ordered to wear a star<\/a>, they were arrested at random and jailed until they bribed their way out. \u00a0Jewish 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

During air raids, they were confined to garbage rooms or provided no shelter at all. \u00a0The tiny number of Jews who received permission to leave the country had to pay an exorbitant tax to get out.<\/p>\n

Anticipation of an early end to the war following the surrender of France evaporated, Buruma notes, when the German army\u2019s invasion of the Soviet Union bogged down and the United States entered the war. \u00a0Between January and March 1942 almost 550,000 German soldiers were killed or wounded, bringing the total casualties to about 1 million.<\/p>\n

The Allies were already bombing Berlin. \u00a0Returning soldiers were telling Berliners about atrocities on the eastern front.<\/p>\n

As Goebbels\u2019 birthday present to Hitler, the vast majority of German Jews had been deported to concentration camps in eastern Europe. \u00a0Although 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. \u00a0In 2023, the protest was featured in a movie titled Rosenstrasse.<\/p>\n

It was no longer possible \u201cto live in Berlin as a \u2018full Jew.\u2019\u201d \u00a0People throughout the city were \u201conly too happy\u201d to report Jews in their midst to the authorities. By the end of the war, only 2,000 had survived.<\/p>\n

Along with readers of Stay Alive, Buruma wonders how many Berliners were aware of the fate of the Jews who were deported. \u00a0A few, he points out, risked their lives to hide Jews, sometimes in their own homes or churches. \u00a0But, after acknowledging that in dictatorships public opinion is hard to gauge, Buruma suggests that many people, \u201cperhaps the majority,\u201d felt \u201cthat they had enough on their minds and what was happening to the Jews was none of their business.\u201d \u00a0The \u201cdesire to look away,\u201d he writes, \u201cto pretend ignorance, to be willfully oblivious, must have been the norm.\u201d<\/p>\n

And some Berliners might tell themselves \u201cthat if the Germans had done bad things\u2026 the horrors inflicted by their enemies more than made up for them.\u201d \u00a0That sentiment was almost certainly reinforced by the vengeance visited on German soldiers and civilians by the Red Army in \u201cthe Battle of Berlin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Buruma notes as well that he has found no evidence \u201cthat most Germans\u201d approved of the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. \u00a0And \u201cquite a few\u201d disapproved of it. \u00a0\u201cHitler may have been a monster,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut one doesn\u2019t murder the head of state, especially when the country is surrounded by enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.<\/p>\n

Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945<\/p>\n

By Ian Buruma<\/p>\n

Penguin Press<\/p>\n

400 pages; $32<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In recent years, Ian Buruma, a regular contributor to Harper\u2019s Magazine and The New Yorker, and author, among…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[9930,112,33614,190,3740,16718,10891],"class_list":{"0":"post-76972","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-berlin","8":"tag-antisemitism","9":"tag-berlin","10":"tag-book-review","11":"tag-germany","12":"tag-holocaust","13":"tag-jews","14":"tag-nazism"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116533297409008356","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76972","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=76972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}