From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 53:
Thinking back to the first year of the war, Hilde became almost wistful: “We had a lot of fun, and danced in bars like the Eden and the Roxy. Hans played jazz music when he was in a good mood. It was a wonderful time, especially at night when we danced with small groups of friends. But then we had to walk through the dark streets to the S-Bahn…. That was not such fun.”
The poet Jochen Klepper, who would later commit suicide with his Jewish wife, wrote about the “Golden October” of 1939, when the weather was still fine before the cold winter months set in. He took a walk along the Wannsee on October 15: “The lakes never looked so beautiful. A marvelous afternoon after the morning rain…. We are so happy about the lovely walks we can enjoy here. All day, until sundown at five o’clock, the terrace doors are open, and the summer furniture is brought out once more. Everything is redolent of the tentative sense of peace.”
As long as one wasn’t Jewish, or involved in active resistance, it was almost possible to imagine that life in Berlin was normal. “Normal” is the word I heard most often from men and women I interviewed about their childhood at the beginning of the war in Berlin. I asked a retired engineer named Jörg Sonnabend about his school days. We were having coffee and cakes prepared by his wife, Dorrit, in the small living room of their apartment in Spandau. A teddy bear dressed in a German naval uniform was sitting on a bookshelf next to a model battleship. “Absolutely normal,” remembered Herr Sonnabend about his primary school. “Nothing different from other times.” He couldn’t recall any pictures of Hitler in the classroom. “Well, yes, in the principal’s office, there was a portrait of the Führer.” Songs? “Yes, there were the usual songs. We sang the Horst Wessel song [the Nazi anthem] during flag raising ceremonies, of course. And as a boy I must confess I loved uniforms. But otherwise, things were entirely normal. All the horror people talk about nowadays, none of that bothered us until the Allied bombings.”
Advertisements in the newspapers promoted ways to cope with graying hair, or ears that stick out, or heartburn after having had too much to eat. Goebbels complained in his diary about the upper classes living it up, partying with foreign diplomats. He vowed to put a stop to that.
Far Outliers 