Mr. Buruma’s book, while triggered by old photos and letters from Leo’s time in Berlin, isn’t only about his father. It tells a broader story of how Berliners approached and coped with the war. ... Mr. Buruma resists glib post hoc censure, acknowledging that German civilians 'lived in constant fear of their own government' ... Exquisite.
Organized like a diary, with a section devoted to each year of the war. This structure lets Buruma incorporate a wide variety of viewpoints ... Every so often, Stay Alive provides a glimpse of Berliners facing the kinds of hard choices that my grandmother felt lucky to have avoided ... At the end of the book, Buruma characterizes his project as 'partly a love letter to Berlin.' This, he acknowledges, may sound perverse; the book is, explicitly and unrelentingly, about the Berlin of the war years, when, in his words, 'unspeakable crimes were planned and perpetrated there' ... Elsewhere in the book’s final pages, Buruma offers a different account of his purpose, more along the lines of a warning ... This is, or should be, the book’s claim to relevance, in which case not love but shame and terror would seem the pertinent emotions.
Crisply told and uncomfortably relevant ... Buruma’s account is long on anecdote and primary sources but somewhat short on big ideas ... Perhaps that is why, amid the color of wartime Berlin in Stay Alive, I found myself wishing that he would delve deeper ... This volume could have benefited from a dash of structured exposition and context ... A major virtue of Buruma’s book is his interviews with survivors, a population that is disappearing fast ... His history preserves a world that is fading from living recollections.
An immersive account of how the inhabitants of a liberal city – including the author’s father – survived fascism ... Buruma pieces together an existence of outward conformity (Leo signs up to be an air raid warden) and inner protest (on Saturday nights he plays piano with the widow of a wealthy Jewish lawyer, an act that could have got them both locked up or worse) ... None of this is morally coherent and yet, suggests Buruma in this wonderfully nuanced book, it was necessary if you wanted to stay alive, and knew yourself to be neither brave nor craven – but somewhere in the muddled in-between.
A captivating mosaic of wartime Berlin ... Taking stock of the moral complexities of his cast, Buruma comes to an uncomfortable conclusion: 'You could not be inside a criminal state without being corrupted' ... Buruma does not shy away from the disturbing conclusion his assemblage leads up to. It’s there in the title ... The depressing moral of Stay Alive is that most people don’t challenge the circumstances they find themselves in. They adapt to them.
Subtly nuanced and beautifully written ... Eschews cliché, so we encounter Germans who lived at the centre of the Nazi state – some at the apex of the regime – who managed to remain decent, even when decency was dangerous.
Harrowing ... A book about the human condition ... This excellent book addresses its readers directly and personally. It is a message for today and not one that coldly records the history of yesteryear.
