John Powers

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 belonged 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 Beruma's own father, did their jobs, took their pleasures, and preferred not to think about the evils under their noses.

This, Beruma 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 Borchardt, 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.