Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939–1945

‘A captivating mosaic of wartime Berlin’ Katja Hoyer, Financial Times

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.