Stay Alive

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.





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 übrig -'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 prisoner conscripted into forced labour 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.



Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands. He studied Chinese at Leiden University and cinema at Nihon University, Tokyo. He has lived and worked in Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, and New York. He is a regular contributor to Harper's and the New Yorker and writes monthly columns for Project Syndicate. He is a professor at Bard College and lives in New York City.



In wartime Berlin it was possible to find every form of human behaviour, from conformity and cruelty to bravery and indifference. Using his father's memories and letters as well as a wide range of other sources, Ian Buruma has composed a brilliant account of what it felt like to be there. Stay Alive is a beautifully written account of a city under military and moral siege.



Beautifully written and deeply researched, Stay Alive is particularly haunting in showing how ordinary Germans conformed with Nazism and the persecution and deportation of their Jewish neighbours. It makes a chilling warning of how people can acquiesce and look away from the worst realities.



An exceptional excursion into the multiple, contradictory lives, voices and dilemmas of Berlin's inhabitants during the Nazi war years... By providing a compelling and compulsive immersion into that crucial period of history, Buruma also eloquently reminds us of how, in our own time, the temptation to look away from persecution and injustice has terrifying consequences.



Ian Buruma 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. Buruma tapped a wealth of sources -- not only published memoirs, but first-hand interviews with elderly survivors and a cache of letters stored in a tin written by Buruma's own father, a forced labourer in Berlin during the war. The beauty of the book is Buruma's nuanced writing about the Germans who weighed resistance against the imperative to stay alive, and those who simply became cogs in Hitler's murderous regime.



Buruma draws on an abundant source of material, including letters and diaries, enriching these with interviews with wartime eyewitnesses.