John Powers

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.

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.