Supplied
- Title: Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945
- Author: Ian Buruma
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: Penguin Press
- Pages: 400
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’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” 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.
It was Adolf Hitler’s 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.
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 – Allies versus Axis – were accompanied by divisions within the city.
The book, an important contribution to our understanding of the war, takes its title from the Berlin goodbye common in the period, bleiben Sie übrig, or “stay alive,” 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 – and one part sad and sober recognition of the great task facing all Berliners, most especially but not exclusively Jews and others – such as those with disabilities, LGBTQ people and dissidents – not deemed sufficiently “pure.”
Ian Buruma.Penguin Random House Canada/Supplied
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 “tried to stay stylishly above our bad times” while cocooned in what he called “our small unreal country world in the midst of war.” 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 – and then restored again.
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’s 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, “What shadows darken our times.”
The danger grew with the appearance of British aircraft in the Berlin skies, first dropping propaganda leaflets, then bombs. The result was a “Berlin pessimism” that Buruma describes with piercing understatement: “Life was getting harder. Fear of a menacing future was one thing. The increasing hardship of daily life in the capital was acute.”
Then came the alternating air raids, American Flying Fortresses by day, British Lancasters by night, a kind of tag-team of terror. “If it wasn’t the air-raid alarms that deprived him of sleep,” Buruma wrote of his father, “it was the maddening nightly raids from fleas and lice crawling and jumping from the wooden barrack walls.”
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. “At 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,” he writes. Then came a brutal transformation in fear: the vengeance of Soviet troops moving inexorably toward Berlin.
Still, the Hitler inner circle pressed on. “People were forced to carry on with the war, to endure, to obey, to resist, ‘until the last house has been reduced to rubble,’” he writes.
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.