John Powers

But I'm not so sure how you'll feel about the Rocky Mountain Oysters.

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 Baruma 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, Beruma 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, Beruma 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 consider 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 Helmut von Moltke, a conservative who seeks to work from inside against the Nazis.

He gets hanged for his trouble.

And there's Erich Ahlenfeld, a Jew who converted to Christianity and remained a German patriot.

He sends a letter to Reichsminister Hermann Goering asking if he could serve.

Now, we do encounter several of the usual suspects.

most notably propaganda minister Josef 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.