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'Wonderfully nuanced,Guardian, Book of the Day
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.
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.
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Reviews
"Buruma's personal connection shines through in the care with which he paints a vivid yet never overly sentimental portrait of the city at war... A captivating mosaic of wartime Berlin."
Financial Times
"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."
author of Autocracy Inc.
"A rich and fascinating portrait of Berlin at war"
Literary Review