Bryn Stole at Commonweal:
In December 1944, amid the bombs and wartime wreckage of Berlin, acclaimed conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler led the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Brahms and Beethoven in a frigid variety theater—since Royal Air Force bombing raids had already wrecked most of the city’s grand concert halls and opera houses. Among those shivering under overcoats in the audience was Leo Buruma, a young Dutch law student who’d been coerced into work at a Berlin munitions factory. The music, Leo wrote to his parents back home in Nijmegen, “lifted one high above the dreariness of our existence.”
Music, and even dancing, continued in Berlin until the bitter, depraved, and bloody final end of World War II. Leo’s son, the Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma, discovers this as he mines his father’s old letters and the recollections of others—memoirs, diaries, interviews—for Stay Alive, his evocative new account of life in Berlin during World War II.
For some it was desperate hedonism, for others pure escapism or cold comfort amid despair. For many, though, it was a way to tune out the horrors unfolding around them.
more here.
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