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< 'Stay Alive,' about daily life in Nazi Berlin, shows how easy it is to just go along

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Journalist and historian Ian Buruma has spent decades writing about dark corners of 20th century history. In his latest book, "Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945," Buruma explores what life was like during World War II in the German capital, where his father was working as a forced laborer. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says Buruma's observations of life under Nazi rule has special relevance now in an era of creeping authoritarianism.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: It's been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker. Yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now, I've read and seen so many different things that I'm always surprised when somebody offers a new angle on what the Nazis wrought. Ian Buruma does this in "Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945," a new book about living in a country where you have no control over what happens. Inspired by the experience of his Dutch father, Leo, who was forced to do factory work in Berlin, Buruma uses diaries, memoirs and some personal interviews - most of the witnesses are dead, of course - to explore how it felt to be in Berlin during World War II.

He weaves together a chronicle that carries Berliners from the triumphant days, when Germany steamrolled Poland and daily life felt almost normal - unless you were Jewish, of course - through the end of the war, when bombs pulverized the city and Soviet soldiers arrived to rape and pillage. As he writes of air raid drills, food shortages and the incessant deluge of rumors, Buruma has to deal with the difficulty that most ordinary Germans left behind very little record. They kept their heads down and tried to stay alive. And so the book moves among more interesting characters, whose multiplicity gives dimension to our usual flattened sense of Nazi Germany.

We meet Coco Schumann, a young Jewish guitarist who risks his life to play the jazz music that Nazis considered degenerate. We meet the 15-year-old Lilo, who starts off thinking that Nazi ideals make life beautiful, but comes to admire the greater nobility of those who tried to assassinate Hitler. There's the dissident intelligence officer Helmuth von Moltke, a conservative who seeks to work from inside against the Nazis. He gets hanged for his trouble. And there's Erich Alenfeld, a Jew who converted to Christianity and remained a German patriot. He sent a letter to Reichsminister Hermann Goring asking if he could serve.

Now, we do encounter several of the usual suspects, most notably propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who, when not coercing young actresses into sex, is busy generating false headlines, ordering movie spectacles to distract the masses - he loved Walt Disney - and monitoring the city's morale. Always laying down edicts, like ordering Jews to wear the yellow star, he's the Nazi who may have done most to affect Berlin's daily life. He even keeps banning and reinstating dancing.

Along the way, "Stay Alive" is laced with nifty details - how one family trained its parrot to say, heil, Hitler, to fool the Nazis if they came to arrest someone; how a crew of filmmakers kept shooting a movie with no film in the camera so they wouldn't be drafted to fight doomed last-ditch battles; how Jewish villas in the posh Grunewald area were bought up or seized by Nazi big shots but now belong to Russian oligarchs; and how some of those trying to elude the Nazis became known as U-boats because they dived into the city's murky underworld, even hiding out in brothels.

As one who's written well for decades about historical guilt and denial, Buruma is too savvy to belabor familiar Nazi horrors. That said, he offers two dark truths that strike me as being especially apt in these days when authoritarianism is making a worldwide comeback. The first is that you can't live in a dirty system without somehow being corrupted. Whether you were a famous symphony conductor or a cop on the beat, Nazism tainted virtually everyone, forcing people to do and say abhorrent things they often didn't believe in and weakening their moral compass. As von Moltke wrote his wife - today, I can endure the sufferings of others with an equanimity I would have found execrable a year ago.

He wasn't alone. The second dark truth is how easy it is to simply go along. Most Berliners - and even Buruma's own father - did their jobs, took their pleasures, and preferred not to think about the evils under their noses. This, Buruma says, is, quote, "disturbing, but should not surprise anyone. Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don't wish to see or hear."

If the book has a hero, it's probably Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who didn't turn away. Along with her partner, the conductor Leo Borchard, she ran a resistance group named Uncle Emil, risking her life to protect Jews, help them escape, and support other groups battling the Nazis. All this makes her much braver than I've ever been, but I equally admire her refusal to be sanctimonious about those who, fearing prison or worse, didn't rise up against the dictatorship. She had the rare virtue of being righteous without being self-righteous.

DAVIES: John Powers reviewed "Stay Alive" by Ian Buruma. If you'd like to catch up on interviews you've missed, like our conversation with Josh Owens about working for a conspiracy theorist Alex Jones or Charles Bethea's description of new high-priced camps designed to help men reclaim their masculinity, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes on our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.

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DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering help from Adam Staniszewski and Diana Martinez. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

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