Life Goes On After September 1939

From Stay Alive! Berlin 1939-1945, by Ian Buruma (Penguin, 2026), p. 19:

New plays were being written for the theater, often by hacks whose odes to the healthy German spirit would not have had much success in Berlin before 1933. German and foreign classics were widely performed, including Shakespeare’s plays. In September 1939, as well as a play by Goethe (Iphigenia in Tauris) at the Volksbühne, and Tosca at the Volksoper, and Der Opernball (The Opera Ball), an operetta set in nineteenth-century Paris, at the former Metropol Theater, home of the Weimar-period avant-garde, there was also a play by Noël Coward. The pages of the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung featured photographs of revues and burlesque theaters, with chorus lines of seminude dancers kicking up their legs, Broadway style. On the surface, it would seem, Berlin was still Berlin, and not a huge amount had changed since the free-spirited Weimar days, except, of course, for the free spirit. Cabarets had lost their bite and irreverent wit. The avant-garde experimentation for which Berlin had been famous was dead. What was left were the classics, and a great deal of mostly insipid entertainment, “joyful art in serious times,” as it was described in the Völkischer Beobachter, the main Nazi newspaper. Goebbels wished to keep people amused, their minds off the perils of war. He even allowed many dance places and nightclubs to reopen at the end of September, after the fall of Warsaw, which had claimed the lives of eighteen thousand Polish civilians. Goebbels laid out his policy for the radio, which he saw as “by far the most important instrument to influence the masses.” To instill the right attitude in people was vital, but “not to be boring, not to be tedious…. The correct attitude is important, but it doesn’t have to be dull.”

That people should be going about their normal lives, attending concerts and movies, sunning themselves at the beach on the Wannsee, betting on the horses at the Hoppegarten, dancing to jazz tunes at the Delphi-Palast, even as people were being tortured in the Gestapo cellars on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, and murdered or worked to death at Sachsenhausen, is disturbing but should not surprise anyone. Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don’t wish to hear or see.