Goodbye to Berlin

The Berlin Stories #2

by Christopher Isherwood, George Grosz (Illustrator), Frank Whitford (Introduction)

In the opening story of the semi-autobiographical Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood writes: 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' But he does himself scant justice: he is not simply an observer, but a writer of immense skill and a master of the unexpected angle. As the critic Walter Allen has said, his originality 'is to show us the collapse of German civilization obliquely, through characters eccentric or bizarre, characters who for one reason or another – sexual, racial, economic – are lost'.

Goodbye to Berlin is made up of six short stories – one of which stars Sally Bowles, who would go on to become the iconic figure at the heart of the musical Cabaret – but the collection has the unity of a novel, capturing the decadence of Berlin and the growing menace of Nazism. Isherwood reveals the city through searing snapshots, capturing a vibrant society pulsing with nightlife 24 hours a day. The sleazy bars, the jazz, the alcohol and the sex are brought to life with his prose, and each conversation carries the uneasy tension of a people hoping to avoid the inevitable.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Short Stories, Germany, Queer, Historical Fiction, LGBT

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

English-born American writer Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood portrayed Berlin in the early 1930s in his best known works, such as Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the basis for the musical Cabaret (1966). Isherwood was a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist.

With W.H. Auden he wrote three plays— The Dog Beneath the Skin (1932), The Ascent of F6 (1936), and On the Frontier (1938). Isherwood tells the story in his first autobiography, Lions and Shadows .

After Isherwood wrote joke answers on his second-year exams, Cambridge University in 1925 asked him to leave. He briefly attended medical school and progressed with his first two novels, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932). In 1930, he moved to Berlin, where he taught English, dabbled in Communism, and enthusiastically explored his homosexuality. His experiences provided the material for Mister Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938), still his most famous book.

In Berlin in 1932, he also began an important relationship with Heinz Neddermeyer, a young German with whom he fled the Nazis in 1933. England refused entry to Neddermeyer on his second visit in 1934, and the pair moved restlessly about Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in May 1937 and then finally separated them.

In 1938, Isherwood sailed with Auden to China to write Journey to a War (1939), about the Sino-Japanese conflict. They returned to England and Isherwood went on to Hollywood to look for movie-writing work. He also became a disciple of the Ramakrishna monk, Swami Prabhavananda, head of the Vedanta Society of Southern California. He decided not to take monastic vows, but he remained a Hindu for the rest of his life, serving, praying, and lecturing in the temple every week and writing a biography, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1965).

In 1945, Isherwood published Prater Violet, fictionalizing his first movie writing job in London in 1933-1934. In Hollywood, he spent the start of the 1950s fighting his way free of a destructive five-year affair with an attractive and undisciplined American photographer, William Caskey. Caskey took the photographs for Isherwood’s travel book about South America, The Condor and The Cows (1947). Isherwood’s sixth novel, The World in the Evening (1954), written mostly during this period, was less successful than earlier ones.

In 1953, he fell in love with Don Bachardy, an eighteen-year-old college student born and raised in Los Angeles. They were to remain together until Isherwood’s death. In 1961, Isherwood and completed the final revisions to his new novel Down There on a Visit (1962). Their relationship nearly ended in 1963, and Isherwood moved out of their Santa Monica house. This dark period underpins Isherwood’s masterpiece A Single Man (1964).

Isherwood wrote another novel, A Meeting by the River (1967), about two brothers, but he gave up writing fiction and turned entirely to autobiography. In Kathleen and Frank (1971), he drew on the letters and diaries of his parents. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), he returned to the 1930s to tell, as a publicly avowed homosexual, the real story of his life in Berlin and his wanderings with Heinz Neddermeyer. The book made him a hero of gay liberation and a national celebrity all over again but now in his true, political and personal identity.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this novel, the author prefers introspection to action, fed by his memories. He positions himself as a "cameraman," observing the characters and graciously unfolding their stories as he shares their daily lives.
In a historic pre-war period marked by the financial crisis and the drastic changes that came with the calm before the storm, Christopher Isherwood weaves a subtle, colorful, and poetic story.
With funny anecdotes, blows of fate, disillusionment, and fears, Berlin saw his last moments of recklessness before the arrival of the Nazis in power.
Built on the art of nuance, Christopher Isherwood relies on empathy, clarity of looks, and the ability to capture collective history in unique destinies, offering us a rare and valuable book.
1. What is the specific novel referred to in the existing document?
2. How does the author's use of introspection versus action contribute to the overall tone and message of the novel?
3. How does the author capture the pre-war period and the impending arrival of the Nazis to power? Sharing a story.

[Jan-Maat]

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking (p.1)
...
I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am horrified to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the tea cosy-cosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of a curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past - like a very good photograph.
No. Even now I can't altogether believe that any of this really happened... (p.252)

So the idea of a camera and of photography frames this little book, my first thought was 'no, you are not a camera, nor can you be' any such assertion always giving rising to the opposite thought. But it seems a key idea - the author pretends he is not the author just a camera, and his stories just photographs, instantly we wonder why does he pretend not to be human, to be a device? And recall that even a camera has to be pointed and clicked, the film wound on, even if there isn't a photographer, there must be a person who sets up the camera trap and that implies any number of conscious and unconscious decisions. A photograph we know isn't always just a true image, it can be manipulated in various ways. The 'camera' decided to be in Berlin, to arrive in 1930 and to leave in 1933. The negatives are only finally developed in 1939, reading the stories one notices that they intersect each other, time has been sacrificed to preserve unity of place, the illusion of a camera present at one location taking a picture, and then we can inspect the scenes captured by the camera in so far as they are careful staged and arranged of posers the whole thing is about performance the book is a game between ideas of theatre and veracity.

I think we can easily say that Isherwood is trying to hide behind the image of the camera and a theme is him playing hide and seek with the reader, he tells us about his life and experiences and yet tries to hide from our view. Some clues as to why occur early on in the third paragraph he talks of the boys whistling to their girlfriends to let them in, he doesn't like this because eventually a whistle so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make quite sure that it is not - as I know very well it could not possibly be - for me (p.2) The man desires to be treated by a young man as his girlfriend. A transgression of sexuality and class (and nation too, if you are of patriotic inclinations). We might understand then why he might hide from his 1939 audience, but then we have to wonder why he reveals so much, this isn't a strip tease, more a compulsive taking off and putting back on the same garment.

My reaction was to imagine that what Isherwood needed was Earnest Hemingway, specifically in Spain, as I recall from Death in the Afternoon Hemingway was obsessed with men having sex with men - he sees it everywhere from the paintings of El Greco to a pair of Americans in a Paris Hotel, with Hemingway providing the Gaydar surely Isherwood would be cosy in another man's arms in no time, but no, this was a false conclusion for in the 15th paragraph, just pages 5 into 6 ,we have the Herr Rittmeister, the riding master who specialises in riding women, overturning the coffee cups as he does so - staining the wallpaper - with coffee allegedly. One has a sense of Isherwood as ambivalent about sexuality, he desires to be desired, and to hear his boyfriend whistling for him from the street, at the same time he is a camera in the zoo, photographing the uncontrollable animal behaviours of the non-cameras, the humans. Separate from them, safe from emotional involvement.

Indeed later Otto is described as an animal, but Isherwood observes the good effects the animal behaviour has on Peter Wilkinson, but also Peter's descent into jealousy whenever Otto looks at a woman, or a poster. Sexual life may have its satisfactions, but Isherwood appears to fear the power of the emotions, I wonder if in part this is because 'Peter Wilkinson' and 'Sally Bowles' are alter egos of Isherwood rather than real people. No doubt the fanciful utterance of a sick person and the relationship between Isherwood and those others not so direct, though when Sally Bowles says that painting her toe nails makes her feel sensual I imagine Isherwood admires her open sensuality, Wilkinson in counterpoint to her is a warning, if you step into a sexual life this is what you'll become - a jealous obsessive. Perhaps because of this the book reminded me of the film La Dolce Vita, which is anything but to its protagonists the politics of the two works is also similar. Here in the legendary hedonistic last years of the Weimar republic no one seems to be having a good time.

The same triad repeats itself through the book - in politics there is communism, Hitler, or indifference - passing on by while wringing the hands. Since Isherwood is a camera, we might expect him to take the third choice and indeed that is the best description of his inactions. During the Sally Bowles chapter Isherwood observes the funeral procession for Social democracy pass under his window - after this he begins to describe himself as a socialist, by extension associating himself with a dead cause, later he is described as a communist, this defined as a belief in equality, and as an anti-fascist. So we ask if the camera is not ideologically neutral, but in fact ideologically committed, do a series of pictures of Berlin's demi-monde and scrapers and strivers barely keeping their heads above water, some of whom support Hitler, most of whom are politically uncommitted amount to a political picture?

There is an implicit warning, if you don't take sides, you don't get to choose and eventually you'll be discussing the nature of death by 'natural causes' (pp.222-224). If you're not involved in politics , politics will involve itself with you. This this emphasised by the visit to the Reformatory, the boys there can see through the windows their options for their future life, the prison or the factory. And the factory has closed down. They aren't locked in because where can they run to? The borstal is a social service, a refuge from home life. Isn't there a kind of natural instinct for freedom? Isherwood asks, there is, but the boys soon lose it (p.239). This appears to be a political commentary, given the choice between work or concentration camps people will be quiet and quickly accept the loss of freedom, and writing in 1939 plainly there are international implications to this. Peace is indivisible, as Molotov said, without a cocktail in his hand.

Why, I wondered did Isherwood stay so long in Berlin - he doesn't seem to have liked it, not even the gay bar and the nightclub, but then the whole book comes down to performance and staging, the art of being a photographer perhaps is in knowing when to take a picture, and I suspect at some point he is staying to collect stories. At the Nowak's he writes of working on a novel about unhappy people in a large country house with unearned incomes while living among unhappy people in a small rented apartment where there is Kein Auskommen mit dem Einkommen, no outcome with this income, one can imagine that at some point the pfenning dropped.

The politics was nicely handled, the Nazi presence builds up and with the eruption of the Americans into the Queer club we sense that the Nazis are street theatre, they are just another form of performance, carefully staged, while in the background is the succession of unsuccessful chancellors as the political process grinds towards failure.

It is a much more miserable and alienated work than I had imagined it might be. But then I suppose when a person aspires to being a camera, what can one expect?


1930-1939
distance, framing, observing, alienation
sexuality, identity alter egos, politics, location
presentation, is anything real?
The reformatry

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Goodbye to Berlin indeed!, at least as it was, and the rest of Europe for that matter, as storm is growing within the German establishment, a storm that will go on to wreak havoc across the land and neighboring Poland as Hilter sets in motion the beginning of the darkest time for humanity in the twentieth century. Originally planned as a huge novel titled "The Lost" covering the years of pre-Hitler Berlin, but was deemed to grandiose for the short stories and diaries written during this time, Christopher Isherwood uses six sketches here forming roughly a continuous narrative between 1930 and 1933, spending this period in Berlin he mixes the decadence and people of high society with also those fearful few who can foresee trouble ahead. From his landlady and the tenants who stay in their apartment, young wannabe socialites trying to make it big, and time spent on Ruegen Island with two male friends who's sexual desire causes conflict during their spell together, these individuals stories are told almost like confessions, where Isherwood himself is just lingering in the background listening a hell of a lot but with just the occasional comments made with a wry sense of humour and his prose has a distant style to it, meaning that even though you are intimate and close with those involved there is also a sense of detachment. Considering what lies around the corner the reading is humorous far more than I expected, but this actually helps make it pleasurable and light rather than dark. Isherwood's "Mr Norris Changes Trains" was also to be part of "The Lost", and there are contradicting overlaps between that and "Goodbye to Berlin" which would have come together had he decided on the full length novel. The Nazi's in general only get mentioned briefly here and it's not until the later stages that the mistreatment of Jews becomes more apparent. "A Single Man" in my eyes is one of greatest small novels of the twentieth century, and I would be lying to say this is better, because it isn't, however in terms of exposing German life prior to war it's carried through with startling ability and deft touch.

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

I believe at one point this novel was going to be called Miserable Mopey English Sod has Absolutely No Fun in Berlin which would have left the reader in no doubt.

I am not so silly as to have expected "Two Ladies" or "The Gorilla Song" in Goodbye to Berlin, as I have discovered since I read Oliver Twist that sometimes they make up songs and add them randomly into the story when they film these books. But I did expect to be reading about Sally Bowles and her exploits at the Kit Kat Club – after all, in Dickens Fagin doesn’t sing "You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two" but he is there for the duration - so what a disappointment when Sally turns up only for 66 pages and it’s just kind of mentioned that she’s a got a 2 week gig as a nightclub singer and there’s no Kit Kat Club at all, so no outrageous MC and no camp drag acts, and after 66 pages no Sally Bowles. And while she’s around all she does is irritate by moaning about how she’s always spending too much time with the wrong gentlemen and drinking prairie oysters which Isherwood mentions like a million times. Right at the end he trawls around a few Berlin night spots and one gay bar is mentioned in one paragraph, and that I guess paragraph was pounced upon by the scriptwriters as their excuse to invent the Kit Kat Club.

Nothing happens in this novel because it’s a thinly fictionalised diary, and not that fictionalised either because he gives his own character the name Christopher Isherwood, which is a bit of a give-away. So we just get a dreary succession of Berlin characters who are kind of there for a bit and then not there, just like people are in life.

It’s all a bit bleurhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

When this was turned into a play it was re-titled I Am a Camera and a critic came up with a great one line review, "Me no Leica" which is one of two one-line reviews I can remember, the other being of Pink Floyd's movie The Wall : "All in all it's just another flick to appal."

Oh well.

What use is sitting alone in your room
Reading Goodbye to Berlin?
Life is a cabaret old chum
So sling it and let’s get a drink.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This classic about the downfall of the Weimar Republic consists of six fragments which Isherwood initially intended to merge with Mr Norris Changes Trains into one cohesive novel - well, that never happened, but "Goodybe to Berlin" still became a staple of interwar literature. The narrator is a certain... *checks notes* ... "Christopher Isherwood", a young British writer who, much like the real author, came to Weimar Berlin to seek adventure in the jazz age cafes and cabarets, but found himself in the midst of the rise of the Nazis and a dire economic crisis. The character "Isherwood" functions as a self-declared "camera with its shutter open, quite passiv, recording, not thinking", showing the lives and experiences of people in Berlin in the early 1903's.

And that famous description I just quoted is of course nonsense: Isherwood came to Germany as an Englishman who has already lived a life, which shapes his perspective (not criticism, just a fact), and especially in the last two chapters, it shows - and they also show what the book could have been if he didn't initially try to remove the "Isherwood" character from the narrative and merely use him as a mirror. It's the gay outsider's perspective that shapes how the common people of Berlin are depicted, and the angle is intriguing.

The first chapter opens with a panorama of the lodgers of Fräulein Schroeder, a landlady who has come under financial duress; then follows the story of the infamous cabaret performer Sally Bowles who would inspire the central character in the musical "Cabaret"; in the next chapter, we follow "Isherwood" to the German seaside, where he lives with gay Peter and his younger bisexual lover Otto; the fourth chapter offers a closer look at Otto's family, the Nowaks, that run a boarding house in the slums of Berlin; then, we meet the Landauers, a Jewish family that is severely affected by the political situation; and in the last chapter, "Isherwood" does indeed say goodbye to Berlin, a city about to become the capital of the Third Reich.

The author does a great job conveying the atmosphere in the city, the growing threat due to the economic crisis and the rise of the Nazis - and especially how many people dismissed, trivialized and / or adopted to what was happening. All of his vividly rendered characters are affected by politics, and when "Isherwood" leaves for good, he knows that some have died and others will die, that the city is doomed - the book was published in 1939. This is a very impressive piece of literature and a prescient historical document.

[Maziyar Yf · Rating 4 out of 5]

خداحافظ برلین کتابی است از کریستوفر ایشروود ، نویسنده انگلیسی . او در این کتاب کوشیده برلین و برلینی ها دهه 1930 را به تصویر بکشد . دورانی پرآشوب، در روزهای پایانی جمهوری وایمار ، زمانی که سایه‌ی فاشیسم بر شهر افتاده و مردم در حال انکار یا فرار از واقعیت‌اند . ایشروود در چنین دورانی زندگی روزمره برلینی ها را با اضطراب، طنز ، تراژدی و فاجعه درهم آمیخته .
از آپارتمان‌های استیجاری و کافه‌های محله‌های فقیر تا ویلاهای ثروتمندان و یهودی ها ، کتاب پر است از شخصیت‌هایی که هرکدام نماینده‌ی بخشی از جامعه‌ی در حال فروپاشی‌اند. در این جهان رو به زوال، هر چهره‌ حامل اضطرابی‌ست که هنوز کامل آشکار نشده ؛ از زنانی که در کافه‌ها آواز می‌خوانند تا مردانی که در سایه‌ی سیاست، هویت‌شان را پنهان یا می کوشند آن را تغییر دهند. برلینِ ایشروود، شهری‌ست در آستانه‌ی انفجار، شاید هم آگاه از آینده ، اما می کوشد تا لبخند بزند ؛ لبخندی خسته، بی‌رمق، وشاید بی‌معنا.
راوی، که خود نویسنده است، با نگاهی شوخ، لحظه‌ها و زندگی برلینی ها را ثبت می‌کند. او نه قهرمان است و نه مفسر؛ فقط ناظر است، او، جزئیات را می‌بیند و به خواننده منتقل می‌کند. در روایت او، هیچ چیز مطلق نیست ، نه خوبی، نه بدی، نه امید، نه ناامیدی. شخصیت‌های کتاب او ، هرکدام نماینده‌ی بخشی از جامعه‌اند ، جامعه‌ای که زیر پوست زندگی و روزمرگی، صدای قدم‌های فاشیسم را می‌شنود اما هنوز نمی‌داند چطور باید واکنش نشان دهد.
. شاید جالب ترین افرادی که ایشروود آنها را می شناسد خانواده بسیار ثروتمند لاندائرباشد ، خانواده‌ای که ظاهرا در آرامش و رفاه زندگی می‌کند، اما سایه‌ی تهدید فاشیسم هر لحظه نزدیک‌تر می‌شود. آنها در ویلایی باشکوه در حومه‌ی برلین زندگی می کنند ، فاصله ای که هم نماد فاصله‌ی طبقاتی و هم امنیت ظاهری آنهاست . اما این امنیت، شکننده‌تر از آن است که به نظر می‌رسد. ایشروود نشان می‌دهد که حتی ثروت و فرهنگ هم سرانجام نمی‌توانند در برابر موج نژادپرستی و خشونت محافظ باشند.
هنگامی که فاجعه فرا می رسد ایشروود به‌جای تمرکز بر خشونت ، مرگ را در بستر فروپاشی اجتماعی و سیاسی نشان می‌دهد . این مرگ، نه فقط یک فقدان شخصی، بلکه نمادی‌ست از آغاز حذف سیستماتیک یهودیان از جامعه‌ی آلمان. راوی، ، این لحظه را ثبت می‌کند ، نه برای تحریک احساسات یا گریه و زاری، بلکه برای یادآوری واقعیتی که در آن زمان هنوز به فاجعه‌ی کامل تبدیل نشده بود.
این لحظه، نقطه‌ی عطفی‌ست در کتاب. از این‌جا به بعد، دیگر نمی‌توان برلین را فقط شهری پر از کافه و موسیقی دید ؛ بلکه باید آن را شهری دید که دارد آرام‌آرام به سمت تاریکی می‌ رود. مرگ ، مانند زنگی‌ست که هشدار می‌دهد که زمان وداع با امنیت، فرهنگ، و انسانیت فرا رسیده و سقوط برلین و برلینی ها شروع شده .
در پایان ، خواننده نه ‌تنها از شهری در آستانه‌ی فروپاشی خداحافظی می‌کند، بلکه با جهانی وداع می‌گوید که گویی دیگر نمی‌تواند خود را از فاجعه جنگ نجات دهد. ایشروود ، واپسین لحظات برلین را به تصویر کشیده ، شهری که هنوز زنده است، اما آخرین نفس‌هایش با خشونت و زوال ، درهم آمیخته‌اند .

[Ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the small pleasures of growing older is that you can re-read your favourite books and, for the most part, they seem fresh and new; one fondly recalls the core story but generally forgets the local colour, the descriptions and prose styling. I was recently reading “Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America” by Christopher Bram; in it he discussed Christopher Isherwood and “Goodbye to Berlin.” Ironically my online book group was reading it at the same time. So, I decided to re-read it for the first time in twenty-five years.

I have always been a vicarious traveller. I’ve been to Italy with James and du Maurier, France with Stein and Baldwin, Spain with Hemingway, China with Pearl Buck, Burma with Orwell, and India with Ackerley and Forster; all memorable trips, but Germany with Isherwood has been a special treat.

I love the interaction of the characters and how Isherwood introduces them to us. I thoroughly enjoyed the milieu of the boarding-house, and the decadence of Berlin circa 1930. Yes, there were Nazis, but their presence added a sense of tension and romance to Isherwood’s grand adventure.

Sally Bowles is an exasperating creature. One loves and loathes her simultaneously. Is she endearing or a nuisance? Both. Is she wicked? No. Self-absorbed? Yes, quite so. One is left with the impression that poor Sally is never going to amount to much as an actress or a singer. She lacks talent, discipline and the requisite commitment to her craft. Instead she seems content to sleep her way to success, only the poor creature hasn’t the good sense to sleep with the appropriate people. She is a good-time girl with delusions of grandeur. It is her imperfections that make her such a memorable character (indeed, actresses as diverse as Julie Harris, Judi Dench, Liza Minnelli and Natasha Richards have played her in dramatizations for stage and screen).

I laughed out loud when Sally commented that her lover's underclothes wear was so old and raggedy that they could have belonged to John the Baptist.

The scenes with Chris, Peter and Otto on the island were truly inspired. Ah, Otto. Who hasn't known an Otto? He's a taker. But then Peter is a user too, isn't he, in his own way? I mean in the end, you get what you pay for. Perhaps if Peter had been more of a man and less of a fishwife...but this was always going to be a short lived relationship.

I found the ending of the "The Nowaks" moving. The images of the patients standing around the bus as it readies for departure are indelibly etched in my mind. Otto really became quite annoying; it’s a wonder he lived passed puberty. I think I could have lived in that house for about an hour.

“The Landauers” section was particularly fine. Natalia is a great character. I loved the scene where Natalia met Sally and they didn’t hit it off – Sally stuck her foot in her mouth after only having said hello. Christopher seems to be the only non-anti Semite he knows. Bernhard is an emotional cripple; manipulative, mysterious and creepy at the same time.

Sally, Otto, Peter, Bernhard…does Christopher seek out neurotic, wayward people because he “likes” them or because as a writer he finds them fascinating?

The final diary entries deftly capture the sense of foreboding and dread as Berlin became the epicentre of a political earthquake that precipitated the Second World War. The descriptions of driving through Berlin with the doomed Weimar police chief, the workers taking to the streets singing The International, and the author's smiling reflection in a shop window are the work of writer of genius.

I read this slowly - savoured it - lazed about Frl. Schroeder's listening to the gossip, hoping she'd make me an omelette.

[Guille · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una novela que no está nada mal y en la que lo mejor, sin duda, es el personaje de Sally Bowles y el capítulo a ella dedicado.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”Everybody stared at Sally, in her canary yellow beret and shabby fur coat, like the skin of a mangy old dog.

‘I wonder,’ she was fond of remarking, ‘what they’d say if they knew that we two old tramps were going to be the most marvelous novelist and the greatest actress in the world.’

‘They’d probably be very much surprised.’”

I was watching the Rick Stein travel show Long Weekends, and he was in Berlin. As with most of his shows, he incorporates books that correspond with his travels and many times produces memories of his youth, travelling about Europe with a knapsack full of books. In this episode, he discussed Christopher Isherwood’s book Goodbye to Berlin and of course Sally Bowles obsession with a concoction she called Prairie Oyster. ”Dexterously, she broke the eggs into the glasses, added the Worcester sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountain-pen.” Sally practically lived on them and soon has Christopher craving them as well, or maybe he just craves them as part of the Sally mystique.

I’m sure almost everyone on the planet has seen the 1972 film Cabaret, based on this book, or the stage play. If you haven’t, you must. Sometime in the early 1990s when I was still hanging about the University of Arizona campus trying to finish up a degree in English Literature, a young woman asked me to go see the stage play Cabaret with her. My budget at the time was more in the range of $1 movies than $60 for a seat to see a play, so I readily said yes and would have said yes if she had sported a moustache and a raging case of BO, but to add to my enjoyment, the young lady was not only attractive but intelligent and a huge fan of Cabaret. We arrived, and I felt constricted in my borrowed suit and self conscious about my skinny tie, which I felt that if the embarrassment reached too high a level at least I could strangle myself with it, quietly, somewhere in the back of the theatre where I wouldn’t intrude on the events on stage.

Before things could begin, a woman came out on stage moving in that self-conscious way that people do who are uncomfortable speaking before a large audience. I thought to myself, shit, she’s going to tell us that the show has been cancelled due to unforeseen disasters, which I was prepared to yell...but the show must always go on. She tapped the mic, always a delaying tactic for the self-conscious, and said, “We have a problem ladies and gentlemen; the lead actor playing the Emcee has become ill and can’t perform.”

I looked over at the stricken face of my companion as groans emanated from the crowd around us. The woman’s voice brightened, ���But, and I can’t hardly believe this, but we called Joel Grey to see if he could possibly stand in...and he said, yes!”

A pandemonium of clapping broke out, led by my ecstatic companion. You’d have thought that a Beatle had wandered on stage as Joel Grey poked his head out the curtain for a moment to soak in the applause. For those who don’t know, Grey was the actor who played the role on Broadway and in the film version, so this was a real treat indeed. At the time, it was a great experience, but of course, as time has gone by, I’ve grown in my own cultural awareness, and my memories of that experience have only become edged in more vibrant colors.

So the poignancy of this book is that it is set in the 1930s, just as the Nazis are coming to power. The gorgeous decadence and extravagant creativity that is exploding out of Germany is about to be stomped with jackboots. Isherwood and Sally Bowles are living in the last few moments of this period and are trying to discover ways to break through and have enough money to leave their hand to mouth existence behind them. They try to shake down a rich American, but discover that they aren’t quite as clever as they thought, nor is he quite as doltish as they hoped. Sleeping with ”dirty old Jewish producers” isn’t really getting Sally anywhere either. She does like to shock people, and when Christopher introduces her to his girlfriend, things do not go well.

”’Haven’t you any small-talk except adultery?’

‘People have got to take me as I am,’ retorted Sally, grandly.

‘Finger-nails and all?’ I’d noticed Natalia’s eyes returning to them again and again, in fascinated horror.

Sally laughed: ‘Today, I specially didn’t paint my toe-nails.’

‘Oh rot, Sally! Do you really?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’

‘But what on earth’s the point? I mean, nobody--’ I corrected myself, ‘very few people can see them…’

Sally gave me the most fatuous grin: ‘I know, darling...But it makes me feel so marvellously sensual….’”

There is this great moment in the book, one of many great moments, when Christopher is talking to a friend about belonging to a place and how Berlin has become that place for him that he can feel most like himself. I think most of us seek such a place our whole lives and have to settle for finding a place that at least allows us an opportunity to mostly be ourselves, but actually finding the Shangri-La, the place that best speaks to our soul, is an elusive discovery. If you have found such a place, don’t let wild horses pull you away from it, but then sometimes, like in the case of Berlin, something happens that changes the place from what you need it to be. The magic is crushed beneath the marching feet of a coming tide of faux-moralistic, bombastic rhetoric.

The rise of Hitler is starting to intrude on their lives, and one of Christopher’s friends makes an observation that could apply to politics today.”The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.”

There is lots to enjoy in this novel, but I must confess that when Sally Bowles is off stage, I pine for her return. What is most appealing about her is her freedom to really be herself, and if you must love her, it will be because you know everything there is to know about her. Shame is a foreign concept to her. Impulses are to be embraced, and life must be squeezed until the last drop of joy or pain can be extracted.

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[Jacob S · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Even now I can´t altogether believe that any of this has really happened ..."

But it did happen. All of it.
Although the Goodbye to Berlin is only semi autobiographic it gives a fine picture of Berlin between wars.
The poor staying poor, the rich getting richer, the intellectuals turning communists and the working class looking for a strong leader to set everything right.
In between the class struggle is "Herr Christoph", a foreigner, an upcoming writer, teaching English to spoiled upper class kids for a penny and once in a while free riding in high society.
It´s not that easy to make a lasting impression as a writer in your threadbare clothes and old shoes, when your last (and only) novel sold just 5 copies.
So why are you here, Herr Christoph?
"To find myself", seems to be the answer. "To get away from the bonds of English aristocracy, explore my true nature, and not least my sexuality".

"But I´m also here to observe. I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

And the observations are nothing but sublime. The everyday life in all layers of society, the growing political tension and the dekadence Berlin was then known for.

A delightful look into a Berlin that is no more.

[Rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

"خداحافظ برلین" تصویر ی سقوط آرومه که ما رو می‌بره به دل دهه‌ی ۱۹۳۰، به شهری که داره از نفس می‌افته اما هنوز سعی میکنه پر زرق و برق بمونه، برلینی که بین مستی شب‌های پر آوازش و وحشت قدم های سنگین نازی‌ها و فاشیسم دست‌و‌پا می‌زنه. این کتاب، با ی لحن خونسرد و تیزبین، مثل یادداشت های ی شاهد عینیه، کسی که نه قضاوت می‌کنه و نه راه‌حل می‌ده، فقط با چشم‌هایی باز و موشکافانه تماشاگره ی فروپاشی اجتماعیه.
این اثر بیشتر از اینکه یه رمان کلاسیک باشه، مجموعه‌ای از روایت‌های کوتاه‌ که در کنار هم یه تصویر کامل‌ از برلین در اون دوران رو ترسیم می‌کنن. انگار نویسنده، تکه‌تکه هایی از زندگی آدم‌های مختلف رو کنار هم چیده تا برلین رو از دل چهره‌هاش نشون بده، نه از توی نقشه‌ها.
ایشرود خودش نقش راوی منفعل رو بازی میکنه، نویسنده‌ای انگلیسی که در آپارتمانی در برلین اقامت داره و از پشت شیشه‌، زندگی دیگران رو می‌بینه. این بی‌طرفی عمدی، هم نقطه‌ی قوته و هم ضعف. از یه طرف باعث می‌شه ما بدون پیش‌داوری به آدم‌ها نگاه کنیم، اما از طرف دیگه، گاهی حس می‌کنی راوی زیادی سرد و خنثی‌ست، انگار وسط فروپاشی اخلاقی و سیاسی، فقط داره چای می‌خوره و نت برمی‌داره😁
شخصیت‌ها جذاب‌ترین بخش کتابن، تنوع روحیات و زندگی هاشون در کنار هم دلنشینه.
تمام شخصیت‌های کتاب، از ی چیزی در حال فرارن: عشق، فقر، سیاست، یا گذشته‌شون. شخصیت‌ها اغلب درمانده، گیج و از خود بی‌خودن، نه به‌خاطر ضعف، بلکه چون جهانی که توش زندگی می‌کنن جایی برای انسجام روانی نذاشته. مثلا جالب توجه ترین مهره ی این داستان زن جوونیه با آرزوی ستاره‌شدن در زندگی‌ای آشفته، " سالی بولز " با اون سبک حرف زدنش، لباس‌ها و رفتارهاش، نمونه‌ی روشن زن‌های بین‌جنگیه، گم‌شده، سرخوش و هم‌زمان تراژیک، .... شخصیت ها آدم‌های معمولی‌ن، بدون قهرمان‌بازی یا شعار، انگار هرکدوم نماینده‌ی یه طبقه‌ یا خرده‌فرهنگن که داره به‌زودی نابود می‌شه.
ایشرود، ساده و‌ شفاف اما با اضافه کردن لایه های پنهان در پی توصیف موقعیت‌هاست. از ی نگاه گذرا به خیابون‌ها گرفته تا اشاره‌ی زیرپوستی به وحشت های پنهان، زبانش دقیق و گزنده‌ست. دیالوگ‌ها پر از جزئیاتیه که از دل اون‌ها می‌شه فضای برلین رو لمس کرد. با این حال، همین سادگی گاهی حس بی‌احساسی به آدم می‌ده. راوی انگار بیش از حد بیرون از وقایع ایستاده و همین ممکنه بعضی مخاطب‌ها رو از نظر احساسی دور نگه داره.
برلین در نگاه ایشرود، همون‌قدر که زنده‌ست، در حال مرگه. از طبقه‌ی کارگر گرفته تا ثروتمندای یهودی، همه دارن زیر فشار تورم، بیکاری، و رعب و وحشت نازیسم له می‌شن.
ایشرود تصویری از جامعه‌ای که چشم بر حقیقت بسته می سازه، در مهمونی‌ها مست و شنگول، در حالی که بیرون در و پشت دیوارها ، پوتین‌های سیاه دارن نزدیک می‌شن. نویسنده خوب فهمیده که چطور انفعال و بی‌تفاوتی می‌تونه ی ملت رو به دام دیکتاتوری بندازه. شخصیت راوی آگاهانه شاید نماینده‌ی انسان مدرن فلج‌شده باشه، کسی که فقط می‌تونه بنویسه، اما نمی‌تونه تغییری بده، مث ی نوع بی‌حسی که حاصل زیستن در همچین دورانیه، ی نگاه بی‌طرف اما عمیق با زبانی کارآمد که بدون اضافه‌گویی معنا می‌سازه، برای همین خداحافظ برلین، بیش از اینکه قصه‌ای برای سرگرمی باشه، سندی‌ از دوران مرگ تدریجی عقل و انسانیته!

[Francesc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leído hace muchos años. Lo recuerdo como un paseo de su autor, Christopher Isherwood, por el Berlín de las entre guerras. Fue una lectura agradable.

Read many years ago. I remember it as a walk by its author, Christopher Isherwood, through interwar Berlin. It was a pleasant read.

[Fabian · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Berlin Stories" all contain so many colors & emotions that the whole desolate grey Berlin of our dreams is pretty much obliterated. Well... sort of. The writer's autobiographical anecdotes are inspiring-- this is precisely what a foreigner writing in a strange land should write like. He is mystified, he is the average onlooker, but he participates often and with polarizing results (even his sexual identity is a big ?), usually saying one thing to a character (lying, inventing, distorting...) and meaning another. Isherwood knows that his naivete only takes him so far-- he seeks out experience and then we are all the richer for it.

"Goodbye to Berlin" is a twofold title in personal and historic terms. Isherwood never left Berlin-- he entertains and proves to be an astute, intrepid travel companion. But when his physical person DID manage to get out, it was just in the nick of time: Hitler's rise is seen as the very death of German bohemia. Isherwood is present at this pivotal & revelatory instant of the 20th century, but only at the margins; this is a compelling, fascinating, far-more-than-just-"interesting" travelogue.

[Jeanette (Ms. Feisty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and kept detailed diaries, from which he created this novel. It's a slow mover, but it has a sense of reality that tells you Isherwood didn't stray too far from his diaries to create it. You see the gradual decline in the fortunes of people of all classes, the undercurrent of growing fear, and the uncertainty about what sort of government will prevail. People tried to go on with life as usual, acclimating so slowly to their future under Hitler that they didn't recognize what they were surrendering.

Particularly chilling is the section at the end called A Berlin Diary, Winter 1932-33. Here Isherwood describes the various incidents that led him to leave Berlin for good. The violence and political unrest became more prevalent, and it was too dangerous to stay. Knowing of the horrors to come, I could not keep the tears from flowing as I read of Isherwood's last morning in Berlin:

"To-day the sun is brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. I go out for my last morning walk, without an overcoat or hat. The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city."

[Isidora · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not quite what I expected and I wish I had ended up liking it more than I did.

The famous sentence from the first page is “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking". Christopher Isherwood created the novel out of his diaries he kept in Berlin in the early 1930s. Towards the end, Hitler was rising, the city gradually changing and the writer decided to leave Berlin for good. This is the section I really liked. The rest, excepting the character of Sally Bowles (played by Liza Minelli in the movie "Cabaret"), left me rather indifferent. I acknowledge the writing, honest and clear, but the camera was way too passive and distant.

[Alexander Peterhans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Still the closest you'll get to time travel to 1930s Berlin.

[João Barradas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quando a sorte presenteia alguém com uma vida travada em tempos de cólera, qual será a melhor atitude a tomar? Enfrentar os eventos vindouros, que não auguram ganhos proveitosos mas apenas feridas impossíveis de sanar, ou aceitá-los e participar neles como um actor secundário, submisso a um papel menor?

Em “Adeus a Berlim”, Isherwood cria uma persona que, segundo o próprio, não é ele mas a ele se assemelha – um britânico aspirante a escritor, em visita a Berlim, que, tal como defendido por uma personagem, adopta uma postura de “uma máquina fotográfica com o obturador aberto, totalmente passiva, que regista e não pensa”. Na nota introdutória desta edição, o autor refere-se às diferentes partes que compõem a obra como “peças”. De facto, não têm o poder narrativo de um conto ou novela mas também não aspiram a esse patamar. São antes relatos de uma cidade em ebulição, num ringue de boxe do civismo, onde a cada canto pode surgir a violência, a condenação, o desprezo e a discriminação cega.

Sente-se o frio da sombra, cheira-se a futilidade materialista e saboreia-se a decadência social. Há referências à perseguição aos judeus e às querelas políticas, a que se contrapõem os ambientes descontraídos mas sempre conspirativos dos cafés, espetáculos e cabarets (ou não tivesse este livro servido como argumento para o filme “Cabaret”), onde planos eram engendrados, contactos feitos e olhares cruzados, numa clara afronta às normas estabelecidas (de antes mas ainda tão vincadas actualmente). De facto, para a purpurina brilhar necessita de um foco de luz e, nesta época, reinava mais um negrume que consumia o fruto interior que designa o ser humano como tal. O que fica desta amálgama? Uma involução do quotidiano, tão bem retratada no ímpeto dos tísicos arredados em sorverem ao máximo a vida de quem os visitava no sanatório.

Tal como o destino “escreve direito por linhas tortas”, também aqui o tempo é desconexo e não linear. Mas nada disso impede a entrega de um retrato frio e indesejado de uma sociedade em queda, onde imperam a desconfiança, a ambição e a disciplina. Tudo à lei da força e da bala, ambas repressoras de qualquer liberdade, inclusivamente daquela que permite ler nas entrelinhas.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

There are times when this observant stance can be quite powerful, and these snapshots of Germany in the last days of the Weimar Republic when Christopher Isherwood went to Berlin in 1929 (initially to visit W.H. Auden) and stayed on and off through 1932 are a perfect example.

There are six sections, each one a little vignette, as if it was written home to amuse the family. He’s sometimes stubborn, lazy, and childish, and doesn’t bother to pretty up his behavior, but rather allows it to appear honestly, giving me an open mind as a reader. I like that a lot.

In A Berlin Diary, he eases us into the scene with some lovely descriptions. You can tell he’s sensitive, self-deprecating, and very observant. We see the streets, hear the people … he even gives us the smells as he experiences them. What I loved was he makes the reader feel the outsider’s vulnerability.

Sally Bowles is a wonderful character, and of course, since I’m a huge fan of Cabaret, I pictured her in this section as Liza Minelli. Sally was one of those people who just charms you in spite of yourself, and even Isherwood seemed to wonder why the two were friends, but just couldn’t resist her. She’s shown in various guises here: poor, rich, sweet, devious, depressed, giddy. In all, she’s, well, absolutely “magnificent, darling.”

I quite enjoyed On Ruegen Island, Isherwood’s little vacation from Berlin, where three boys frolic and bicker on the beach, and share psychological analysis of each other’s problems, along with a particularly intriguing argument between Christopher and a German doctor about communism, idealism and discipline.

The Nowaks was a little grating at first, but then came alive. Chris visits Otto, one of the Ruegen Island boys, and gets roped into living with him and his struggling family. Isherwood’s writing here is wonderful--full of color and movement and language and character. But politics also comes into play. This discussion about the local tailor was so revealing.

“Frau Nowak would sometimes say: ‘When Hitler comes, he’ll show these Jews a thing or two. They won’t be so cheeky then.’ But when I suggested that Hitler, if he got his own way, would remove the tailor altogether, then Frau Nowak would immediately change her tone: ‘Oh, I shouldn’t like that to happen. After all, he makes very good clothes. Besides, A Jew will always let you have time if you’re in difficulties. You wouldn’t catch a Christian giving credit like he does … You ask the people round here, Herr Christoph: they’d never turn out the Jews.’”

The Landauers are a successful Jewish family Chris comes to know. Bernhard, set to take over the running of their thriving family department store, receives a death threat, calling them “filthy Jews,” and saying if they don’t leave Germany they’re dead.

He says, “The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they’re capable of anything. That’s just why they’re so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment …” One of several times in the text that I was catapulted into the present of my own country. Terrifying.

With A Berlin Diary, Isherwood goes out quietly by providing us, like in the first section, some colorful scenes of the city as he prepares to return to England.

Great reading. Looking forward to The Last of Mr. Norris, and much more Isherwood after that.

[Jean-Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

True story: there is more to Isherwood's Berlin than Sally Bowles (thank God) whose stage and screen versions have eclipsed her literary origins. Where I used to find her exhilirating, I now find her irritating, but guess what?--this book has so much more to offer. You're so busy following Herr Issyvoo--Chris--Christopher Darling--Christoph--through German boarding houses, and bars, and tenements, and sanatoriums, and department stores that you hardly notice the Nazi Party is steadily gaining influence and consolidating power--which is precisely the point. A handful of the characters are fervent Nazis themselves, but they are friends, neighbors, ordinary people in the street. Similarly little fuss is made about several presumably gay characters, although in this respect much more is left open to interpretation. Some (not I) call this a novel--its structure is replicated in Alice Munro's much later and entirely unrelated Lives of Girls and Women.

A Berlin Diary (August 1930) - 4
Sally Bowles - 4
On Reugen Island - 5
The Nowaks - 5
The Landauers - 5
A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3) - 4

[Mel Bossa · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I love about Isherwood's writing is its honesty. He's so transparent and seems incapable of being pretentious. And there's a lovely loneliness to him I find so endearing. Maybe I wish the characters in these stories would have treated him better, or maybe it was he who was too "English" and well-bred to really let his guard down with any of the women and men he met. Of course, the real central figure in this novel of collected vignettes, is Berlin. A Berlin that changes from person to person, depending on who they are and what side of the storm they stand. Will they be watching it roll by from afar, or will they be ruthlessly picked up by its cruel, maniacal winds?

There's a haunting in this book. A ghost in every corner. It felt a little like walking through Pompei, knowing that what you are seeing is a fleeting moment of life captured in death forever.

But then again, every day should be lived that way.

It's a grey day here in Montreal, and this book made it even more grey and gloomy. But as I was walking through town this morning, I thought of the characters of Isherwood's Berlin of the thirties and thought how sad that a city so full of glitz and art and culture and promise could be wrecked and turned into the heart of a beast in a matter of a few years.

It could happen here. It could happen anywhere.

On a happier note...

Wait, actually, there isn't a happy note in this book. Even Sally, the "Upper Class Waif" is terribly tragic in her own funny way.

Well, Goodbye to Berlin and Goodbye to sad, lonely books.

[Nigeyb · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has been a while since I last read Goodbye to Berlin (1939). I loved it then and still find it a fascinating read.

Not so much a novel as a collection of semi autobiographical interconnected vignettes, diary entries, and character studies that serve as a haunting farewell to a city staring into the abyss.

Published in 1939, just as the clouds of World War 2 were gathering, the book provides a vibrant snapshot of Weimar era Berlin. Narrated by a young English writer named "Christopher Isherwood" we get an eye witness account of a chaotic and fascinating world of seedy boarding houses, nightclubs, a wealthy family, and the humble apartments of ordinary people.

The book is populated by a cast of unforgettable characters. Most famously there’s Sally Bowles, the divinely decadent nightclub singer whose flamboyant theatricality masks a profound vulnerability, and whose reckless abandon embodies the carefree hedonism of the era. Alongside Sally are Fräulein Schroeder, the maternal landlady, the Landauers, a wealthy and cultured Jewish family, and many more.

The book exudes a powerful sense of atmosphere and the reader comes away with a vivid picture of the vibrant world of 1930's Berlin. The book's final chapters, as Isherwood prepares to leave the city, are infused with a profound sense of loss, a heartfelt farewell to a world he knows will never be the same. It is a farewell not just to Berlin, but to an entire way of life. A classic book that retains its relevance and power.

5/5

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,' are the famous lines on the first page. This a semiautobiographical account of Isherwood's time in 1930s Berlin.

Written as a connected series of six short stories the book, first published in 1939, is a brilliant evocation of the decadence and repression, glamour and sleaze of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people at threat from the rise of the Nazis: Natalia Laundauer, the rich, Jewish heiress, Peter and Otto, a gay couple andthe 'divinely decadent' Sally Bowles, a young English woman who was so memorably portrayed by Liza Minnelli.

[foteini_dl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Όχι.Ακόμα και τώρα δεν μπορώ να πιστέψω πως κάτι από όλα αυτά συνέβη στ’ αλήθεια…

Μ’ αυτή την πρόταση κλείνει ο συγγραφέας αυτό το γλυκόπικρο,νοσταλγικό-και εν μέρει αυτοαναφορικό-βιβλίο.Ένα βιβλίο που προϊδεάζει για τα πρώτα σημάδια του ναζισμού που έρχεται το 1933 και θα ταράξει όχι μόνο την Γερμανία,μα και ολόκληρη την Ευρώπη.

Άνθρωποι που έχουν κλειστεί σε μια γυάλα (ψευτο)ευτυχίας νιώθουν κάτι ν’αλλάζει.Ο συγγραφέας φωτογραφίζει τους έρωτές τους,τα όνειρά τους,τις αδυναμίες τους.˙Όλα αυτά σ’ένα Β��ρολίνο που από την πόλη της (σεξουαλικής και όχι μόνο) ελευθερίας και των πειραματισμών της δεκαετίας του ’20 αρχίζει να γίνεται άγριο.

Ο Isherwood αποχαιρετά το Βερολίνο που ήξερε και,όσο και να μην μπορεί να το πιστέψει,τα χειρότερα ήρθαν.Και εκείνη η άγρια περίοδος εμφανίζεται ξανά.Αχ,και να ‘ξερε…

[Sakshi Kathuria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isherwood’s writing is absolutely poetic and yet so lucid. His goodbyes to a horde of eccentric yet interesting characters in his life spent in Berlin, during the Weimar Republic supremacy, is described most phenomenally. His narrative binds the reader to these characters brusqueness and curtness which is most fascinating. The characters in all the five stories are described in a sort of poetic manner and in a very delicate yet brisk tone in the thick of change in the tide during the political dispensation of the time when the rise of ‘Der Führer’ was raking havoc across Deutschland. Needless to say, I thoroughly enjoyed his writing.

[piperitapitta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye.

Ora che ho appena finito di (ri)vedere Cabaret (ma chi lo sapeva, allora, che Cabaret era - quasi - Addio a Berlino e viceversa!)
nella mia mente le parole di Isherwood si sovrappongono alle immagini del film di Bob Fosse.
La Berlino e il tono di Christopher Isherwood sono più pacati, il clima non è così rutilante e gaudente com'è nel film, né la mia immaginazione mi aveva portato a immaginare l'esuberante e disnibita Sally Bowles con gli occhi bistrati, le labbra laccate a forma di cuore e il seducente reggicalze nero sulle cosce bianco latte della divina Liza Minnelli.
Ma Christopher Isherwood sì, forse lo immaginavo proprio con gli occhi acquosi e cangianti, spalancati per lo stupore, di Michael York, anche se tutto, nei capitoli (più simili a fotografie che racconti) che tendono a identificare l'autore con il suo personaggio, è filtrato più dallo sgomento che dalla meraviglia.
Sgomento verso una città e una nazione che Isherwood saluta, ma che descrive a posteriori, quando ormai la follia nazista non è più una minaccia (Una promessa? Un'epifania?), ma una certezza che spinge l'Europa intera verso il baratro del secondo conflitto mondiale.
È un addio alla Berlino dei primi anni Trenta, gli anni dell'angelo azzurro e di Marlene Dietrich, dunque, la Berlino dei grammofoni e delle stanze in affitto, dei kabarett e dei caffè, delle ragazze a caccia di successo, degli avventurieri e dei ricchi commercianti ebrei, delle Fräulein Schroeder e del suo mondo crepuscolare (l'incipit che descrive il salotto e i dettagli dell'arredo dell'appartamento è memorabile tanto quanto è impressionante la resa fotografica), dei Nowak e della loro miseria, dei Landauer e del loro tramonto (Natalia, la bellissima Marisa Berenson nel film, e il di lei zio Bernhard: impossibile dire se è più bella la figura della rigida e compassata di Natalia o quella del rassegnato e ambiguo, mai dichiarato apertamente omosessuale, Bernhard), quella delle lezioni di inglese per stranieri che mantengono Christopher e gli aprono le porte di tutte le Berlino possibili: ricca, misera, conservatrice, avanguardistica, ebrea, nazionalista, comunista, nazista.
Quella della Gioventù hitleriana e del morbo che la anima, che irrompe e consuma come un virus una città che era simbolo della libertà, del peccaminoso e del godimento, che rinuncia alla sua libertà fino a diventare uno zoo che mette in mostra il lato peggiore dell'animale umano.
Fino all'addio, malinconico e struggente, ma al tempo stesso compassato e rassegnato - «Domani parto per l'Inghilterra. Tornerò qui tra qualche settimana, ma solo per prendere le mie cose prima di lasciare Berlino per sempre.
La povera Fräulein Schroeder è inconsolabile: «Non troverò mai un altro gentiluomo come lei, Herr Isservut, sempre così puntuale con la pigione... Non capisco proprio perché vuole andarsene da Berlino, così, tutt'a un tratto...».
È inutile cercare di spiegarglielo o parlare di politica. Lei si sta già adattando, così come si adatterà a ogni nuovo regime. Stamane l'ho sentita persino nominare con tono riverente «der Führer», ciacolando con la moglie del portiere. Se qualcuno provasse a ricordarle che alle elezioni dello scorso novembre ha votato comunista, con tutta probabilità negherebbe con veemenza, e in perfetta buona fede. Si sta semplicemente acclimatando, in ossequio alla legge naturale, al modo di un animale che cambia il pelo ai primi freddi. Migliaia di persone come Fräulein Schroeder si stanno acclimatando. Dopotutto, chiunque sia al governo, sono condannate a vivere in questa città.» - ultima fotografia, in bianco e nero, di una città e di un tempo tramontato nell'ascesa di Hitler.
E se a lettura ultimata c'è un motivo per cui, nonostante lo splendido sguardo fotografico di Isherwood che scatta un'istantanea dopo l'altra del periodo - «Io sono una macchina fotografica con l'obiettivo aperto» dichiara l'alter ego di Chris­topher Isherwood arrivando nell'autunno del 1930 a Berlino, dove resterà fino al 1933. -, nonostante la splendida scrittura limpida e raffinata, non mi fa considerare "Addio a Berlino" un capolavoro (cosa che invece mi viene di pensare del film e dell'interpretazione di Liza Minnelli), forse questo va ricercato in quell'eccessivo distacco, in quel compassato atteggiamento (molto inglese) che Isherwood stesso sceglie di tenere, in cui preferisce mantenere la distanza dagli eventi così come dalla celata sessualità del suo alter ego, e apparire più spettatore che attore: distanza che ha impedito, anche a me, di avvicinarmi tanto quanto avrei desiderato fare.

https://youtu.be/5QS1l1mSDSo

[P.E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dreary, callous, and somewhat slanted portrayal of underprivileged Germany and underground Berlin from Autumn 1930 to Winter 1933.


- Hans Baluschek, Arbeiterstadt (1920)


British writer Christopher Isherwood lends his name to the homonymous hero of this narrative. This is already somewhat unnerving. But what is unsettling in this story, early on? The narrator's position in his retelling the events.

'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.'

Is that so? What about intention? Here is a link to Jan-Maat's review on the book, dwelling on this specific subject :
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


THE EVENTS
A tenant in an impoverished neighbourhood who makes a living teaching English to children from affluent families, Isherwood soon gets acquainted with Sally Bowles, a boisterous 18-y-o, entertaining an ambiguous relationship with the former, who becomes her love confident, himself living vicariously, as a sponge. Sally is kept by patrons.
Their muddled relationship smacks of unspoken minds... This is eerily reminiscent of Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's
All along, our elusive hero meets many a reveller and many hopeless destitute families.
Sometimes both.


THE STANDPOINT
True, Isherwood is cautious not to appear too much in the frame of his narrative, and always stays at a distance. But, insisting so often on not being a part of the scenery he so liberally describes... he appears all the more present.

'Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching.' - p.230

With the narrator acting as a whistleblower regarding the squalor, petty thefts, randiness, shabbiness, the vulgarity and universal prostitution ruling over Berlin (indeed, a lot of characters are exerting themselves to please patrons, leading them on more or less openly), at the end of the day, the narrative is all the more disturbing as Isherwood does not give away his reasons for lingering around here. Telling the story of other people, he avoids telling his. Quite convenient.

'I helped her, putting firewood and pieces of coal into her hands; she took them from me, blindly, without a glance or a word. Feeling, as usual, that I was only in the way, I went into the living room and stood stupidly by the window, wishing that I could simply disappear.' - p.161

[Ratko · Rating 4 out of 5]

„Збогом Берлину“ је кратки роман или скуп од шест међусобно повезаних прича, а заправо интимистички дневник самог писца о годинама које је провео у немачкој престоници.
На самом почетку он ће написати „Ја сам камера...“, тако да ћемо све време кроз његове очи и размишљања пратити живот у вајмарском, предратном Берлину тридесетих година. Ишервуд пише импресионистички, са смислом за детаљ и атмосферу. Додуше, нема овде узаврелости и звукова улице и подрумских биртија попут оних у Деблиновом „Берлин, Александерплацу“ или декадентних сцена на које смо навикли у серији „Вавилон, Берлин“. И поред тога, свакако ћемо, кроз дијалоге и описе искуства самог аутора, осетити атмосферу сиротињских четврти, претрпаних станова, спајања краја с крајем и пустих снова кабаретских певачица, а у реалном животу само обичних проститутки. У позадини, тек понеком реченицом или дијалогом промиче сенка нацизма која се почетком тридесетих година ХХ века све више надвија над Берлином и целом Немачком. Тек на последњим страницама биће више речи о успону нациста и урушавању Вајмарске републике и тај део ми је био и најзанимљивији.
Свакако дело вредно пажње, посебно за заљубљенике у декадентни Берлин двадесетих и тридесетих година ХХ века или за љубитеље Берлина уопште.

[Dimitri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un giovane scrittore inglese descrive da una giusta distanza, fra tragedia e ironia, non lasciandomi volutamente capire quanto siano reali o quanto inventate, le persone che incontra a Berlino nei primi anni Trenta: operai e disoccupati, cantanti e baristi, ebrei e nazisti, comunisti e borghesi in rovina. Ecco a voi la borghesia in rovina.

Poi è scoppiato un piccolo litigio domestico perché Herr Bernstein non voleva che nel pomeriggio sua moglie andasse a far spese con l’auto; negli ultimi giorni in città i nazisti avevano provocato un sacco di disordini.
“Sarebbe meglio che andassi in tram” ha detto Herr Bernstein. “Non vorrei che mi rovinassero la mia bella auto prendendola a sassate”.
“E se prendessero me a sassate?” ha rimbeccato Frau Bernstein.
“Ach, che sarà mai? Se ti fanno un’ammaccatura, ti compro un bel cerotto, spesa minima cinque Groschen e tanti saluti; ma se mi ammaccano l’auto, minimo son cinquecento marchi, non so se mi spiego.”

E poi c’è Sally Bowles, la cantante del “Lady Windermere”. Senza di lei la Holly di “Colazione da Tiffany” – così come la conosciamo – forse non sarebbe mai esistita.

“Oh, ciauuu, Chris, gioia mia!” gridò Sally dalla soglia. “Come sei stato dolce a venire! Mi sentivo super super sola”.
“Mi sa” diceva Sally “che deve essere favoloso, fare il romanziere. Un sognatore, un idealista privo di senso pratico … La gente crede di poterti fregare quando vuole, senonché poi ti metti a scrivere un libro su di loro, dimostrando che razza di porci sono, e hai un successo pazzesco e fai i soldi a palate …”
“Ho idea che il mio problema sia di non essere abbastanza sognatore …”
“Ah, se solo potessi diventare l’amante di un uomo ricco sfondato. Farei qualsiasi cosa, ora come ora, per diventare ricca.”
“Ma Sally!” Mi fermai. La fissai a bocca aperta. Fui costretto a ridere: “Be’, sei davvero la creatura più straordinaria che abbia mai incontrato in vita mia!”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QS1l...

[Nick Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I had not read any of his works, I always had a prejudice against Christopher Isherwood. I placed him amongst the British writers who played at being communist in the 1930s, but then resorted to their class background during the Cold War and became pillars of the establishment. Maybe they were serious writers, but they were dilettantes at life. I read Goodbye to Berlin because it was on the shelves of the house I stayed in while on holiday and I found that I enjoyed it. Isherwood had originally planned to write a larger, more ambitious work about Germany in the early 1930s and what remains feels as though it is a series of fragments of a larger novel. The opening and closing chapters are entitled A Berlin Diary, the first describing the characters who share the narrator’s digs, the last is a series of descriptions of events during the months of the Nazi takeover. In between are four chapters focusing on a series of characters. Although there is a rough chronology there is not a straightforward progression. It feels very much like a series of reminiscences, each focusing on the narrator’s relationship with a single or couple of characters. One of the most annoying responses to literature is when the reader becomes obsessed by the relationship of the events described to the life of the author, when fiction is treated as autobiography, but Isherwood asks for such a response: not only is the narrator named Christopher Isherwood, he shares the author’s biography. To constantly worry about the autobiographical standing of the work is probably trivial, but I find the function of the narrator within the text problematic. The second paragraph of the book begins with the statement, “I am a camera,” but I find the passivity of such a stance to be limiting. While the narrator dominates the text he has little dramatic or thematic purpose. As a watcher and recorder of events he remains an outsider, a tourist to Berlin and the political changes: outer events happen but he has no way of responding other than a passive description: the rise of the Nazis, for instance, is just something nasty that occurs. The strength of the book, however, is in the vignettes. The Sally Bowles chapter is perhaps the most vivid, but I am unsure how much of that is due, as least for those who know the film Cabaret, to the writing and how much to Liza Minnelli’s charisma overflowing from the film: although the character in the book is English I have problems in hearing her dialogue in anything but Minnelli’s American voice. Perhaps the most ambitious section is that about the narrator’s relationship with a Jewish family, the Landauers, but it is here that the limitations of the book are most obvious: the book seems to be striving for a grander significance than it achieves, to be summing up its times, but it doesn’t get beyond its vividly described moments. But maybe I am being unfair, maybe I should be contented with a series of atmospheric short stories rather than finding an unsatisfactory novel.

[Connie G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin in the early 1930s, recorded his experiences in his diaries, and later created the fictional "Goodbye to Berlin". Although Isherwood was raised in an upper middle class home in England, he had a more frugal life in Berlin as an English tutor. To stretch his money, he lived in boarding houses where he met some memorable characters. This book is composed of six chapters (or interconnected short stories) that should be read in order.

He tells us about the narrator's role as an observer: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking....Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed." In stories occurring over three years we are introduced to characters from all segments of society, and see the deep division between the wealthy and the poor. As the stories move on to 1933 there is an increase in unemployment, poverty, and homelessness, banks are closing, and there is an escalation in violence. People were looking for scapegoats, and someone to lead them out of desperate times. There were clashes between different political factions.

His characters are unforgettable, and often sleazy, unlikable people. Sally Bowles, a self-centered cabaret singer who was trying to sleep her way to success, was later made famous by Liza Minelli in the movie "Cabaret". Otto Nowak is an annoying adolescent, a "user" of both men and women. The wealthy Jewish Landauer family own a huge department store, and are a potential target for the Nazis. Motherly Fraulein Schroeder, his gossipy landlady, has little interest in politics and is just trying to survive in a changing world. Isherwood uses very different dialogue for each character so they seem like unique individuals.

Isherwood left Berlin in 1933 as the city became dangerous and violent. The Nazis were rising to power in Germany. It was the end of an era, and time to say "goodbye" to Berlin.

[Hux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having been interrupted halfway through by a scratched cornea, it took a while to get through this. I managed to finish with my one good eye and thus, have had plenty of time to digest it. Overall, I enjoyed Isherwood's writing, the stark, brisk quality of it which remains detached and objective. He simply tells us what he sees and documents 1930s Berlin with a series of vignettes and diaries as the Nazis begin to loom in the background. The book is presented as life-writing but clearly has flourishes of creative and narrative fiction.

The best part of the book without question is the chapter that focuses on Sally Bowles. Firstly, I have never seen the film 'Cabaret' so I can't comment on how similar the characters are or how much of the book was translated into the film, but I suspect very little given how horrendously unlikeable the woman is. If ever a woman embodied the decadence and decay of Weimer Germany, Sally Bowles is it. She is presented as a spoiled child, privileged and and ignorant, permissive and promiscuous, endlessly using the word 'darling' like some kind of caricature. She sleeps with everyone and inevitably gets pregnant then pops to the hospital for an abortion. She agrees to marry a 16-year-old boy purely because she thinks he has money. Suffice it to say, she is a rancid creature and profoundly awful. Which is presumably why she's so wonderfully entertaining to read about. I am genuinely amazed Jean Ross (who Sally Bowles is based on) agreed to let Isherwood portray her as such a mercurial, self-indulgent buffoon.

I liked Isherwood's writing a lot but felt the book was a little haphazard and thrown together, each section introducing new characters and moments that reminded me it was a true account of his time in Germany. I would be keen to read more of his work, however, preferably something which has more of a fictional narrative.