By Kevin Seabrooke
Already a struggle, life in Berlin grew worse in 1943, with the German defeat at Stalingrad, and then nightmarish as the Allied bombs began to fall, before the terror of the approaching Red Army gripped the city.
Buruma’s title for this moving portrait of a city and its people came from the cessation of the common Berliner greetings of “Auf wiedersehen” or even “Heil Hitler,” which gave way to Bleiben Sie übrig—“Stay alive.” By the end of World War II, Berlin’s population of 4.2 million had fallen by nearly 50 percent.
Buruma’s own father, a Dutch student conscripted into forced labor in the war economy along with 400,000 other imported workers, was one of the people trying to stay alive in Berlin.
Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945 (Ian Buruma, Penguin Press, New York, NY, 400 pp. March 17, 2026 $32 HC)
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