Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939–1945
From the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 to its end six years later, when Berliners greeted one another, they would say ‘bleiben Sie ubrig’ – ‘stay alive’. Compiled from letters, diaries and memoirs, Staying Alive is a moving and revelatory account of that period and the people who remained in the city, and the impossible reality they faced daily: the choice to conform, resist or simply endure.
Synopsis
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.
Publisher information
- Publisher: Atlantic Books
- ISBN: 9781805462897
- Number of pages: 400
- Dimensions: 234 x 156 mm
- Languages: English