Ian Buruma on Berlin during World War II
n December 1944, amid the bombs and wartime wreckage of Berlin, acclaimed conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler led the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Brahms and Beethoven in a frigid variety theater—since Royal Air Force bombing raids had already wrecked most of the city’s grand concert halls and opera houses. Among those shivering under overcoats in the audience was Leo Buruma, a young Dutch law student who’d been coerced into work at a Berlin munitions factory. The music, Leo wrote to his parents back home in Nijmegen, “lifted one high above the dreariness of our existence.”
Music, and even dancing, continued in Berlin until the bitter, depraved, and bloody final end of World War II. Leo’s son, the Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, discovers this as he mines his father’s old letters and the recollections of others—memoirs, diaries, interviews—for Stay Alive, his evocative new account of life in Berlin during World War II.
For some it was desperate hedonism, for others pure escapism or cold comfort amid despair. For many, though, it was a way to tune out the horrors unfolding around them. An aristocratic young journalist, Ursula von Kardorff, recalled flitting around a “carnival of lemurs” as well-heeled Berliners threw raucous parties between the bombing raids: “Not terribly nice, really, this dancing on a volcano, simply because people want to use their homes before they have to move into shelters,” she wrote.
Another survivor, Lothar Orbach, recalled his mother desperately banging on an elderly neighbor’s door on Christmas Eve in 1942 in hopes of escaping the Gestapo outside. “Mother opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say a word, he slammed the door in our faces and threw the bolt,” Orbach later wrote in his memoir, among the many sources Buruma turns to for his account. “The record player, barely audible when we first approached the door, suddenly blared Handel’s ‘Messiah.’”
Marie Jalowicz-Simon, who was among the few Jews who managed to escape the Nazis in Berlin by going underground, recalled hearing housewives throw open their windows on a spring day in 1944 as a schmaltzy hit song came on their radios. Soon, though, “we heard the screams of tortured inmates” at a nearby prison camp—“and all the windows closed at the same time as if by previous agreement.”
Berlin is portrayed in Buruma’s fractured account as a city of intense contradictions. The raucous, libertine parties of the Weimar years—when Berlin was a hub of bohemian artistry, sexual fluidity, political ferment, and modern living—roll on under the ever-tightening limits of life under Nazi rule. Berlin, the old Prussian capital, never backed the Nazis before the 1933 seizure of power and, as Buruma’s witnesses recount, many likely remained cool at best toward their fascist overlords (a skepticism that was returned by many in the Nazi hierarchy).
The outbreak of war in 1939, when Buruma’s chronicle begins, surely unleashed anxieties, but many also experienced elation as Germany’s Blitzkrieg offensive scored stunning early victories. By then, crushing repression had already come for conspicuous political opponents—Socialists and Communists above all—and the noose was tightening quickly around the Jews who hadn’t yet managed to flee the country.
A handful of the characters featured in Buruma’s account, such as the journalist Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, keep up a dignified but meager resistance to the very end, daubing a defiant “Nein” onto the soot-covered wreckage of the city in 1945. Even that required death-defying courage, but the symbolic power of such gestures is matched by a tragic political futility that was so powerfully captured in Hans Fallada’s postwar novel Every Man Dies Alone. The German people never rose up against Hitler, even after the war was clearly lost, although many would later claim to have opposed the Nazis in their own (very quiet) ways.
But Buruma is less interested in assessing the effectiveness—or extent—of resistance than in giving a sense of how intense the struggle must have been to maintain any moral dignity under a murderous criminal regime. “Some Germans managed to remain decent, when decency could be very dangerous,” Buruma writes in his introduction. There are brave acts of humanity hazarded, lifesaving bits of kindness extended to others at great personal risk, but these are often more morally complicated than one might imagine. Not everyone in Buruma’s Berlin is out for their own survival, but there are also vanishingly few saints untainted by compromise or selfishness.
After having doors slammed in their face on Christmas Eve, Lothar Orbach and his mother manage to escape after another neighbor—a tiny old woman—beckons them in to hide under her bed. The woman proceeds to pin on her Nazi badge before greeting the Gestapo at her door. Distant relatives agreed to shelter Marie Jalowicz-Simon as she tried to escape deportation. But on the first night, as Buruma quotes from her memoirs, she awakes to the man of the house standing over her bed. “A weedy-looking man with a crumpled face, and in a nightshirt far too short for him, he indistinctly muttered a few revolting obscenities. You can guess the rest of it. I could neither kick up a fuss nor send him back, so I just let him have his way.”
By the end, it was the shriek of the advancing Red Army’s rocket launchers—nicknamed Stalin’s Organs—that blasted away the last traces of normalcy in the German capital. An old man in a Syracuse, New York, nursing home tells Buruma about experiencing defeat as a fourteen-year-old boy in the rubble of Berlin: “The first Russian soldier he ever saw offered him a bottle of vodka and a cigar. When the boy choked on the cigar smoke, the soldier said ‘Vodka good, Germany kaputt,’ and vanished.”
Buruma relies heavily on anecdote and memory to piece together his book. Snippets from the weekly newsreels and local papers—soccer scores, ads appealing to the wartime mood, frugal fashion tips on how to sew homemade funeral clothes—punctuate a pastiche of memoirs, letters, diaries, and the childhood recollections of a few now-elderly Berliners. That infuses his account with immediacy but also presents its own problems and limitations. Buruma offers some caveats—his father’s letters, for instance, obviously had to pass the censors—but takes a largely uncritical approach to his sources. If survival under a totalitarian regime often involved miserable moral compromise, as Buruma’s book emphasizes, then readjusting to a world turned upside down by Allied victory after 1945 involved its own delicate (or perhaps craven) rearranging of values, narratives, recollections, and identities. Buruma knows this well; he’s also the author of the very good Year Zero (2012), about how the defeated or liberated societies around the world convulsed with the end of World War II.
Still, the result is a book whose power lies in vivid, immediate, humane, and heartbreaking vignettes. It’s a fractured, contradictory narrative, but what else can be expected in wartime, and under a fanatical dictatorship where—with bad luck and the wrong company—even an irreverent joke could cause trouble? Buruma draws his title from a farewell that became common in those dark years: Bleib übrig, which he translates as “stay alive.” That catches the gist, but not the bitter awkwardness of the expression, which more literally means “remain leftover,” “unused,” or, perhaps, “unnecessary.” Be a spare, and remain spared.
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939–1945
Ian Buruma
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/dancing-volcano
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George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)
Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday
The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World
George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism (1941)
George Orwell in an age of moralists
Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge
Politics and the English Language (1946)
After the truth-shower 