Meet the Author: Ian Buruma

[music] We are grateful to our friends at Northshshire Books and Monroe Street Books for their underwriting of this program. Northshshire Books has outlets in Manchester, Vermont, [music] and Saratoga Springs. and Monroe Street Books is on Route 7 just north of Mberry. Both are wonderful independent [music] bookstores and we thank them. Hello, I am Lewis Meyers and this is Meet the Author [music] where today our guest on Zoom with us from New York City is Mr. Ian Baruma uh who's going to be talking about his recently published book Stay Alive uh the story of the life in Berlin during the war years 1939 to 1945. Um Mr. Buruma was born and raised in the Netherlands. He studied sinology which is actually the study of China at Leiden University in the Netherlands and also in Tokyo. He has worked as a journalist in Asia, Europe, and New York City, and he has written for and still writes for many major publications. He is currently based in New York as is a professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College. His book, which was published this spring, uh received very favorable positive reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine. Uh Mr. Buma, thank you for being with us today. Welcome. >> Pleasure. Well, I want to start by saying first of all, um this is not a beach read just to to uh tell our our readers this is a very serious uh researched uh and well-ritten book on a very troubled time in in in h in human history uh which I think has some lessons for us today as well. Um, Joseph Stalin reportedly uh said at one time that uh a million deaths is a statistic and one death is a tragedy. And I think what you've done in this book is which is remarkable is take a uh extraordinarily wellressearched sort of global look at the conflict and and the situation in Berlin but then use it to talk about individual people. One of whom actually was your father Leo. So let me ask you when you began thinking about writing this book and and talk a little bit about the process of of beginning and of doing the research. >> Yes. I mean you say it's not a beach read. It's it's that depends on one's taste of course. Uh it's a bit it's a gloomy subject. In that sense it's not a beach read but I don't want to give the impression that that it's full of statistics and dense research. I'm not a professional historian and as you say it's about people. Um I think there are two reasons I was interested in this book and and have been it's been simmering in my mind for a long time. One is that I grew up with my father's stories and um I was born in December 1951 so still very much in the shadow of World War II and one grew up with stories of occupation so on and so forth and um I heard stories from my father. He was not reticent about his experiences. Um and uh so Berlin was sort of part of my childhood even though we hadn't I'd never been there and we didn't go there until much much later. That's one reason um to find out what the city that my father experienced as a forced laborer in in Nazi Berlin being bombed day night and so on. What he I wanted to know more about that city. Um a city I've grown to like even love. The other reason was that growing up in a country that had been occupied by the Germans, um, one heard a very one-sided story. It was always about suffering under the Nazis, heroics, uh, of of the resistance and and collaboration, but you never rarely heard much about what it was like for the Germans, for ordinary citizens in Germany. Um, I mean, one read about sort of villainous SSmen and Gustapo officers and all that, but what it was just what it was like to be in the country of the perpetrators and that is something that has fascinated me ever since I lived in Japan uh in the 70s. >> The your tell tell talk a little bit about your father uh Leo. um uh what was his life like before uh the war started and and talk a little bit more about his experience during the war. Well, he was uh a law student when the war began. Um and um very soon uh the occupation authorities, the Germans started distrusting uh students uh because they thought they would join the resistance. Um and so he couldn't um complete his studies during the war. And in 1943, uh, when the Germans had run out of manpower for their own industry because all the young German men were on the battle front, they decided they were going to to force men in occupied countries to come and work in German factories. And Dutch and students uh were given a an option. They could sign a loyalty oath to the occupation Nazi government, in which case they could postpone this um event. uh or they had to go uh and work in Germany immediately and my father like more than 70% of students refused to sign went into hiding and something went wrong uh in the student underground and he found himself on a railway station surrounded by German police with his father and they announced that those young men who did not um immediately sign for work in Germany that their parents might be arrested. And after a lot of twoing and throwing with his father, my father decided he couldn't risk it. And so he ended up uh working in a factory in East Berlin, um my mother was Jewish, but she lived in in Britain, so she was not directly involved in the war. My father was not, and that meant that he had a certain degree of freedom. Even though he was in a sort of work in a factory and in a camp with wooden barracks and all that, he could still roam around a bit when he wasn't too hungry or too exhausted. And so the letters that he sent to home to his parents and to his best friend um give you a fascinating glimpse of daily life in Berlin at the time. And when I found those letters um at the time of his death uh just before co that's really when I decided there's a book in this. >> So Mr. Brimma we uh you also spoke to many other people in in Germany and Berlin uh individuals who told their stories as well. How did you find them? >> Um I was very lucky. This is the first book that I've ever used uh a research assistant and I found a marvelous um woman who lives in Berlin and she went through um the lists of people in old in in in senior homes and uh and and by other means found people to talk to all of whom were well into their late 80s or 90s. Uh one person was even over a hundred. So um their memories were not always clear and they were of course childhood memories but nonetheless fascinating to to listen to. The other sources that I had were letters and memoirs. Um so I didn't use um I used secondary sources but I didn't quote historians on the on on on the period. I I stuck to eyewitness accounts and that includes memoirs and autobiographies and that kind of thing. And >> I think that makes this book gripping and personal uh uh and and wrenching. Uh as I said in the opening quote about Stalin, uh you know it you bring it down to the individual and there are individual tragedies here and individual heroism in in many cases. Um do you speak German? Yes. Uh I speak it ungrammatically but but I I speak it. the uh the book begins sort of goes chronologically beginning I think in 1939 or perhaps even earlier uh and you see the uh uh the rise not only well Hitler's already come to power I think in much of the book but uh Germany is is certainly doing well in the beginning of the war obviously as they uh uh cruise through much of Europe um and you look at it from the perspective of both the uh Aryan or or Gentile German citizens and of course the the Jewish citizens and others who are being rounded up. So you have this a very uh broad camera uh which looks at at how it's affecting all of them. Um, how did you remain I I'll say impartial if if that's the right word in terms of talking about the experiences of both the uh the the persecuted and the uh the people who were then in power. >> Yes. Well, it's a very good question. I mean the book starts in September 1939. So it's literally when the war began when when uh Germany invaded Poland and it ends with the last war day of the war. Um partial and impartial is difficult words to apply. I mean obviously I mean I've used the the diaries of Joseph Gibbles who was the propaganda minister. A very nasty piece of work and you can't be impartial in the sense that you sort of want to give him his due. I mean there's little due to give in in in his case. Um but uh I I do think one has to take a step back and you can't let simply let your own emotions dictate uh what you write because I think what is important in in any history not just this but you uh by writing it and researching it you learn to understand things better and you one hopes that one's book allows readers to understand things better. So my aim is is is to is understanding not in the sense of justifying but understanding what happened and what motivated people and why people behaved in certain ways rather than simply condemning which is too easy. I mean obviously let's say the persecution and mass murder of Jews cannot be justified in any any way. I mean but it's not enough simply to say how terrible. You have to then describe what happened, why things happened in a certain way, what people were involved and uh and and that will lead then to sort of a deeper understanding. I think there were and there were many gray areas you mentioned that you know obviously there's no gray area when it comes to Gerbles or or some of the others obvious many of the others but there are gray areas where perhaps your own father's experience where he certainly didn't support this regime and yet he felt that he had to go along and and do the labor because otherwise his family members would be heard he might have been executed um but there are others even under less threat who cooperated to a certain extent some of them were true believers. Others were go alongers, if you will. Um, so you do write rather well about I don't know if it was a majority of Germans or certainly a sizable number of Germans in Berlin who who were uh if not conflicted at least in a gray area. Can you talk about that? Yes. I mean, I think life is full of gray areas and life and also even in in dismal circumstances like living under uh the Nazis, um life goes on and you have to cope and this can cause very serious moral dilemmas. Take one of the most dramatic ones that that in one case of that is described in the book. Um you're a decent person. You're not a Nazi. You're against the Nazis. um a Jewish friend or a a Jewish stranger who's in in danger of his or her life comes to you and said, "Could you hide me?" Now, you know that hiding a Jew in those circumstances, not only you don't only risk your own life, but you might risk the lives of your family, your children. The right thing to do is to hide such a person. But do you do it at the do you risk your family to do so? That's not a simple situation. It's a real moral dilemma. And there are of course many other moral that come up in a criminal state, which is what it was, that perhaps are less dramatic, but they happen all the time. And yet, of course, people people do have to cope. They live, they have to survive. And so, and not everybody is a hero. >> Was also happening as as you mentioned in your home country of the Netherlands. Carrie Tenboom whose book I think I remember reading many years ago was one who did shelter uh Jews in in the Netherlands. So there were people who who did this who showed extraordinarily courage um and others who who simply didn't know what to do or were fearful and and went along. Um, you also talk in the book, I think you convey the massive destruction uh that occurred in Berlin. And we've seen footage of the aftermath with just a ruined city, but you show over time the uh the the the havoc and the destruction that the bombing uh Allied bombing caused. Of course, that was also happening in London and other places where the Germans were bombing. But uh one gets a real sense of utter destruction and and how a human psyche can try and survive in those situations. Can you talk about that a bit? >> Yes. I mean the destruction was of course absolutely deliberate. Um it was the result of a partic of of something that was called strategic bombing. And the theory was developed before World War II and the idea was if you bomb civilians badly enough and um so that people can no longer have a roof over their head and to terrified constantly that somehow then the the morale of the civilian population will break and they'll turn against their leaders. It's a theory that is still alive and I mean the bombing of Iran in many ways is justified by exactly that idea. they'll they'll then rise up which never actually happens but that that was so people like Bomber Hack Arthur Harris who the head of the IRAF charge of bombing um believed this and he thought you just have to keep on destroying destroying destroying destroying and at some point the war will come to an end. Of course it didn't. And I think what happens more often and what what what I found fascinating reading accounts from Germans is that the idea Lond in Britain people were very proud of the idea that the Londoners quote unquote can take it and that the resilience of the Cocknes and uh so forth. Uh the same thing was true in Berlin. I mean the the Berliners could take it and there was a resilience there and being bombed by a foreign power. Whatever you think of your own government puts one's back up and uh and it creates a kind of solidarity uh not least with the authorities who are the only ones who can feed and shelter you. So it never it never has the result that was desired but it does destroy entire cities. Well, the other thing that happens and and you see this clearly in your book is people are simply trying to get survive the night. Uh so they can't really and they're dis, you know, they're separated. They're all in individual bomb shelters or they can't have the resources to rise up against a uh their own government because they're simply trying to survive, get through to the next day, find food to, you know, to survive another day, etc. So um the uh going back for a moment you we talked about the gray area you write in in num various parts of the book about the distinctions that the Nazis and Gerbles etc make uh in terms of someone's Jewishness. So there were levels of Jewishness and uh I your own father uh came under one of those categories but not one that would necessarily have gotten him sent immediately to a concentration camp. But can you talk about that? How did the Germans >> No, no, but my my father did not come into that category because he wasn't Jewish at all. My mother was. Um and the categories were in the the racial laws that the Nazis drew up in in 1935. And um basically uh what it came down to is if you had uh four Jewish grandparents, you were a full Jew. If you had two Jewish grandparents, you were a a half Jew of the first degree. If you had one Jewish grandparent, you were partly Jew Jewish of the second degree. Now the people who were fully This was complicated by the fact that if you're a half Jew, but you were raised as a Jew in the Jewish religion, you counted as a full Jew. Um, so religion had something to do with it, but it didn't define it entirely. And what it meant in in practical terms, in horrifyingly practical terms, if you were counted as a full Jew, you had to be murdered. You were deported to the death camps in Poland uh or shot. If you were a half Jew um and your that you you were bullied in many ways, you would have trouble getting jobs and life was hard, but you would not necessarily be deported. A Jew married to a gentile would be protected from de deportation but also bullied in many other ways unless the marriage uh the the the gentile wife had converted or they led a Jewish religious life in which case you would so it was absurdly complicated uh and but it had life and death or death consequences. There's always been uh ongoing discussion of what Germans knew uh and uh the ordinary German knew about what was going on e both in the concentration camps and simply of their neighbors who were being rounded up and you do talk about that a bit in the book. What was your impression? Uh how much did the average Berliner know about uh what was happening to people who were being deported? Well, I think one has to distinguish between uh what they could have known, what they wanted to know, um what they knew but didn't drew the draw the right conclusions. I mean, human beings have a very a great capacity not to know what they don't want to know. And uh if those who wanted to know what was going on had ample opportunity to know. There were a lot of letters being sent back from the Russian front, the Eastern front by soldiers describing in detail what was going on. Um and and my example when people say, "Oh, well, people couldn't really have known is always Anne Frank." Anne Frank was a teenager locked up in a in a in a in the attic of a house in Amsterdam. And in her diary, I think in 1943, she clearly says, uh, we are destined to be uh killed probably by gas. And she heard it on the BBC radio. Now, there were enough people, it was, it was certainly forbidden. There were enough people in Germany and in Berlin who did get information from the BBC and so people could have known, but many people didn't want to know. They looked the other way. Life was more comfortable that way. Uh, and we know from our own lives. I mean there are all kinds of terrible things going on uh in the country one is living in and you don't really necessarily want to know too too painful. By the way, your f earlier question about where my father fitted in um that isn't entirely irrelevant. You had all these different distinctions of of levels of Jewishness, but you also had racial distinctions among non-Jews. So at the bottom of the pile were the Slavs, the Poles, the Russians uh who were treated appallingly. A little above that were uh people like Romanians and Italians and then above that were people from the nor Nordic countries. So Norwegians, Dutch, Danes who are treated slightly less bad. And uh so these crazy distinctions um existed amongst Jews as well as non-Jews. >> There is a an orgy of violence that occurs uh first after Hitler is nearly uh assassinated by some generals from military officers. Uh he goes absolutely more berserk than usual uh for him and uh uh ends up killing 5,000 people. I mean family members of all the people that were involved. I mean it's just and then at the end of the war um and this is depicted in a movie that Bruno Gans uh starred in called the last days I think of Hitler. Um Germans turn >> the downfall I think. >> Yes. The downfall a fantastic great movie. um the the German milit parts of the German military in the SS turn on anyone in the German population they think is being defeist or is deserting and they're literally hanging Germans from lamp posts uh at the slightest pretext. um anyone from the age say of 14 to to 60 they think is uh should be fighting or should and they send all these young kids out to die basically uh at the end of the war to try and stop the the Russians uh and Americans from entering the city. Um it's a horrifying uh tale at the end of the war and just tragic because so many people got so close to surviving this war and then did not and they died at the hands of their own uh military. U tell us about that part of the war. at the very end. >> That really had to do with the delusion that uh the Germans somehow uh would be victorious purely because of of sort of the spirit and the will of the people because they knew they were facing by that at that stage they were facing allied armies in in the case of Berlin the Soviet Soviet Red Army that was vastly superior in in manpower in in tanks in airplanes. I mean the Germans had were on their last legs and Hitler wanted to basically wanted all Germans to fight to the death and the idea was it spread and this was the propaganda at the time that the sheer willpower and spirit of the German race would somehow prevail and be victorious. And so anything that put that spirit and that willpower into doubts like people you could people overheard in a cafe saying well I don't think this is going well or something those people could be arrested as defeatists and uh and as you pointed out I mean hung from lamposts and um this was really part of the craziness of um Nazi Germany and it froze. The terrible violence did not end with the actual end of the war in April of 1945 because as we know the uh for a period of time the Russian uh army ran a muk and uh uh used rape as a uh a weapon of war or now post-war uh and uh thousands possibly hundred thousand women in Germany were attacked uh and you do write about that at the end of the book um and then of course Germany was uh Berlin was divided into the eastern and western sectors Did the Americans and the British, knowing the how the Russians were were behaving, the first wave of Russians at least, did they do anything to intervene and uh protect the women in Germany? >> Well, they wouldn't have been able to because they weren't in Berlin when this happened. It it it did come to an end fairly soon after the war. I mean the discipline was imposed by the Soviet um uh the the officers, but um it was really during the battle of Berlin and in in all the way in the in the Soviet in the Red Army campaign from Russia all the way to Berlin on the way countless women were raped and and murdered and and uh this was really it was revenge and uh the Russians or the people in of the Soviet Union, not just Russians, but Ukrainians and others had been treated barbarously by the Germans. And Stalin um did not discourage this. I mean, he said at one point, well, you know, you should you should allow the boys to have a little bit of fun. And so, uh, the other irony of of of this story is that a lot of the soldiers in the Red Army were were peasants who came from areas where they had never seen an electric bulb. Um, and they enter Germany and Germany at that stage in in spring of 1945 was pretty much destroyed. But even those when when they entered the ruins of Berlin to them this was a world of un unheard of luxury they they saw you know electric light running water um people in with watches and so uh they felt you know the German people have treated us horribly and now now it's our chance to do what we want and so stealing watches was part of it and raping women was other. >> You talk about how in the years after the war, Germany has acknowledged to a large extent uh its collective uh responsibility uh or guilt and um uh there there's and now and and had a very pacifist official policy. Their military has always been quite small since then. There's been a feeling that we should not rearm. That of course is changing now in the face of Soviet actions in Europe. Um >> Russian actions. >> Russian, excuse me. Yes, Russian actions. Sorry. Um did tell us talk a little bit about the German uh response after the war and their um the way that they did uh sort of enforce a collective responsibility if you will. Well, this is a complicated story because there was a difference between West Germany and East Germany. The East Germans being a communist state took the view we were the anti-Nazi. We were the anti-fascists and so we don't really need to reflect too too much because we were on the right side. That was the official line. In West Germany, of course, it was different. But it took time. So, in the 40s and even 50s, very few Germans wanted to acknowledge what had happened. They wanted to forget rebuild the country um and build up industry and the economy and they didn't want to really think about what had happened at all. and war crime trials which had been conducted by the allied nations in in the late 1940s uh were seen as enemy propaganda victor's justice and it was really only 60s when with when the the post-war generation the children of the of the adults who were responsible for what had happened during the war when they grew up and became students and they started asking questions and uh and you had a lot of student protest And it was the time of the Vietnam War and and questioning the past then became a real thing in West Germany and um it became part of it of school education. People began began to take it very seriously but it was less about the war as such. It was really very much concentrated on the Holocaust and again the Holocaust had not been talked about at all really before the 1960s. It was then that the Holocaust be became a huge subject and uh the West Germans tried to deal with that as best they could. The East Germans did not because to them the murder of the Jews was just part of the the fascist primes and and they were the anti-fascists. Of course, West Germany and Berlin in particular became a a political load stone in the Cold War, of course, when President Kennedy went there in 1963 to give his famous speech and and other places. Um the um finally, we want to move forward and you alluded to it a few minutes ago um how people can not see what they don't want to see. Um you're a professor of human rights at Bard College. Um, we are in a time in this country where we are facing perhaps some of the same issues that or echoes that we'll put it of of what you talk about in your book in the 1930s and 1940s in Germany. Um, can you talk a little bit about that when you talk to your students now and when your students talk to you? What are some of the issues that come up today in terms of uh of what we're seeing in this country today? Well, the students I find, but that may be partly because of the the particular college where I teach, but they they seem a lot less political than the students, let's say, of the 1960s and and early '7s were. So, it doesn't come up all that much with the students, but what you're saying certainly went through my mind when I began to write this book. And in some ways, it's one of the reasons I I decided to write it because uh easy comparisons between our own times and and and the past are always a mistake. I mean, Donald Trump is not Hitler. We're not living in the Third Reich. Uh differences are enormous. But it is true that the post-war world in the west of liberal democracy, of freedom of speech, of uh um all the things that we take for granted are now under a great deal of pressure. And we're hearing um ideological statements that 20, 30, 40 years ago would have been impermissible and would have been completely marginal because they were too they they were too much like a lot of the rhetoric that people got in in fascist states and Nazi states in in the 1930s and they've become now almost mainstream. So there is plenty to worry about. And the the notion of looking away when bad things are going on uh was some something that certainly motivated me in um researching what it was like to be a German under much worse circumstances um in the 1940s. >> Well, it is a tremendous book. Um and I want to thank you for for writing it. I do think it has echoes for our time today. Uh the book is Stay Alive by Ian Baruma, the German warriors in Berlin from 1939 to 1945. I think it's an invaluable addition to the uh historical record of that time. Uh Mr. Broom, thank you so much and uh thank you for being with us today. >> Thank you. It was a pleasure. >> Please join us next time on Meet the Author. [music]