Stay Alive

'A captivating mosaic of wartime Berlin' Katja Hoyer, Financial Times 'Brilliant and beautifully written' Anne Applebaum 'Brings to life Berlin during World War II so vividly that you can imagine yourself blithely strolling the streets of the city or hunkering down in the bomb shelters' Barbara Demick ' A rich and fascinating portrait of Berlin at war' Literary Review 'Wonderfully nuanced' Guardian When war broke out in September 1939, what was most striking in the German capital at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, soon got unfathomably worse. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, Stay Alive chronicles daily life in wartime Berlin with extraordinary power and immediacy. Here are the movie stars and swing dancers, the resistance circles and SS patrols hunting deserters, the desperate calculations of survival and collaboration. As Allied bombs reduced the city to rubble and Soviet troops closed in, the common greeting of Berliners became not auf Wiedersehen or Heil Hitler but bleiben Sie übrig - 'Stay alive'. Revelatory, devastating and deeply humane, this book illuminates how ordinary people navigated the moral catastrophe of the Third Reich - what it meant to resist, to conform or simply to endure. Buruma shows how a society's accommodation to evil unfolds one compromise at a time, and why understanding this descent remains urgently relevant today.

'A captivating mosaic of wartime Berlin' Katja Hoyer, Financial Times 'Brilliant and beautifully written' Anne Applebaum 'Brings to life Berlin during World War II so vividly that you can imagine yourself blithely strolling the streets of the city or hunkering down in the bomb shelters' Barbara Demick ' A rich and fascinating portrait of Berlin at war' Literary Review 'Wonderfully nuanced' Guardian When war broke out in September 1939, what was most striking in the German capital at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, soon got unfathomably worse. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, Stay Alive chronicles daily life in wartime Berlin with extraordinary power and immediacy. Here are the movie stars and swing dancers, the resistance circles and SS patrols hunting deserters, the desperate calculations of survival and collaboration. As Allied bombs reduced the city to rubble and Soviet troops closed in, the common greeting of Berliners became not auf Wiedersehen or Heil Hitler but bleiben Sie übrig - 'Stay alive'. Revelatory, devastating and deeply humane, this book illuminates how ordinary people navigated the moral catastrophe of the Third Reich - what it meant to resist, to conform or simply to endure. Buruma shows how a society's accommodation to evil unfolds one compromise at a time, and why understanding this descent remains urgently relevant today.

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city's descent into utter annihilation In 1939, when Ian Buruma's epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, the book is a study in extremes--depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism. By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not " Auf wiedersehen " or " Heil Hitler " but " Bleiben Sie ?brig "--"Stay alive." And by war's end Berlin's population had fallen by almost half. Among the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Buruma's own father, a Dutch student conscripted into forced labor in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers. Buruma gives due weight to his and their experiences, which give the book a special added dimension. This is a book full of tenderness and genuine heroism, but it is by no means sentimental: again and again we see that most people do not do the hard thing most of the time. Most people go along. It's a lesson that has not lost its timeliness.

An astonishing account of life under a murderous regime amid a great city's descent into utter annihilation In 1939, when Ian Buruma's epic opens, Berlin has been under Nazi rule for six years, and its 4.3 million people have made their accommodations to the regime, more or less. When war broke out with Poland in September, what was most striking at first was how little changed. Unless you were Jewish. Then life, already hard, was soon to get unfathomably worse. Buruma gives tender attention to the Jewish experience in Berlin during the war, weaving its thread into the broader fabric of this marvelously rich and vivid mosaic of urban life. The distillation of a broad-gauged reckoning with a vast trove of primary sources, including a surprising number of interviews with living survivors, the book is a study in extremes--depravity and resilience, moral blindness and moral courage, pious bigotry and unchecked hedonism. By 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, ordinary life in Berlin would acquire an increasingly desperate cast. The last three years of the war in Berlin are truly a descent into hell, with a deranged regime in desperate free fall, an increasingly relentless pounding from Allied bombers, and the mounting dread of the approaching Soviet army. The common greeting of Berliners was now not " Auf wiedersehen " or " Heil Hitler " but " Bleiben Sie ?brig "--"Stay alive." And by war's end Berlin's population had fallen by almost half. Among the people trying to stay alive in the city was Ian Buruma's own father, a Dutch student conscripted into forced labor in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers. Buruma gives due weight to his and their experiences, which give the book a special added dimension. This is a book full of tenderness and genuine heroism, but it is by no means sentimental: again and again we see that most people do not do the hard thing most of the time. Most people go along. It's a lesson that has not lost its timeliness.