Staying Alive: Berlin 1939-45 by Ian Buruma – How Berliners Defied Their Nazi Masters | History books

IIn December 1941, Nazi authorities received a letter from a soldier complaining that he was deeply disgusted by what he had seen during his last leave in Berlin. While his comrades were dying on the front, many young men seemed to have evaded military service and were now dancing in crowded Berlin bars. The women were no better off: they were without husbands but full of ration coupons stolen from soldiers while on leave, and were busy gorging themselves. “If Berlin were Germany, we would have lost this war years ago,” the complainant said angrily.

Berlin has always been a separate case. The legacy of the wild Weimar years – all that artistic and political extremism, not to mention the absurdity of life – continued under the Third Reich. The city remained defiant and, despite the efforts of senior leadership, was annoyed at being told what to do. This, at least, was the situation in 1941.

By the time Ian Buruma’s father, a conscript worker from the Netherlands, arrived two years later, Berlin had begun reluctantly to play by the rules. The war was going badly now, with the Russians advancing from the east, and American and British bombs falling from the sky. Food was scarce, Jewish citizens were disappearing daily, and Hitler and Goebbels, both of whom were in the city frequently, became more restless and cruel by the day. Now, whenever Berliners encounter each other in a food line or in a bomb shelter, the more likely they are to greet each other. Please let me knowDean – “Survival.”

However, Buruma says, wherever you look, you can still find pockets of resistance. He is not referring here to well-organized underground networks, but to ordinary men and women, who are not particularly brave but are still capable of doing the right thing. When Jews were ordered to start wearing identification badges, many of their fellow Berliners made a point of walking up to them in the street and shaking their hands. Young Leo Buroma, recruited to work in a heavy engineering factory, meets a Ukrainian girlfriend, clearly ignoring the Nazis’ dictum that he, as a “Germanic” Dutchman, should not associate with an “inferior race.” It may not seem like a lot, but, as Buruma says, “not everyone is cut out to be a hero.”

It can be difficult to research these small acts of grace 80 years ago. Buruma begins with his father’s letters home, which he began systematically going through after Leo’s death in 2020. The young man clearly did not want to frighten his family – he described the after-effects of the heavy bombing as merely a “fantastic sight” – and was careful not to fall foul of the German censors. However, when reading between the lines, Ian Buruma combines the presence of external conformity (Leo signs up to be an air raid warden) and internal protest (on Saturday nights he plays the piano with the widow of a wealthy Jewish lawyer, an act that could have gotten them both locked up or worse).

Other witnesses, such as journalists Ursula von Kardorff and Ruth Andreas Friedrich, took care to keep only scrambled and cryptic diaries during the war, but later reconstructed them into coherent accounts for publication. Von Kardoff could never be described as a resistance fighter, but her memoir shows someone trying hard to remain respectable in a criminal state. Her father, a successful portrait painter, lost his teaching job thanks to his opposition to the regime, but her mother, a textile designer, continued to furnish the homes of Nazi nobility. Ursula herself delivers warm clothes to Jewish homes but wonders if she is only doing so to ease her conscience. Her real suffering is reserved for her brother, who is fighting for Germany on the Eastern Front.

None of this is morally coherent, and yet, Buruma suggests in this fascinating book, it was necessary if you wanted to survive, and knew that you were neither brave nor a coward – but somewhere confused in the middle.