The Berlin Novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains & Goodbye to Berlin

The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

MR NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS


The first of Christopher Isherwood's classic 'Berlin' novels, this portrays the encounter and growing friendship between young William Bradshaw and the urbane and mildly sinister Mr Norris. Piquant, witty and oblique, it vividly evokes the atmosphere of pre-war Berlin, and forcefully conveys an ironic political parable.





GOODBYE TO BERLIN


The inspiration for the stage and screen musical Cabaret and for the play I Am a Camera, this novel remains one of the most powerful of the century, a haunting evocation of the gathering storm of the Nazi terror. Told in a series of wry, detached and impressionistic vignettes, it is an unforgettable portrait of bohemian Berlin - a city and a world on the very brink of ruin.

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

490 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1945

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr Norris Changes Trains is somewhat like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes turned inside out – in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes the narrator Dr. Watson assists a genius private investigator and in Mr Norris Changes Trains the narrator William Bradshaw assists a vulgar shady operator…

Opposite me, in a big arm-chair, sat Arthur, with a thin, dark, sulky-looking girl on his lap. He had taken off his coat and waistcoat and looked most domestic. He wore gaudily-striped braces. His shirt-sleeves were looped up with elastic bands. Except for a little hair round the base of the skull, he was perfectly bald.
“What on earth have you done with it?” I exclaimed. “You’ll catch cold.”
“The idea was not mine, William. Rather a graceful tribute, don’t you think, to the Iron Chancellor?”
He seemed in much better spirits now than earlier in the evening, and, strangely enough, not at all drunk. He had a remarkably strong head. Looking up, I saw the wig perched rakishly on Bismarck’s helmet. It was too big for him.

And Goodbye to Berlin is an account of fellow tenants and all kinds of wretches abiding in Berlin. The most picturesque piece of it is Sally Bowles which pleasantly reminded me of Breakfast at Tiffany’s…

She was wearing the same black dress today, but without the cape. Instead, she had a little white collar and white cuffs. They produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in grand opera.

The times of great social shifts are always murky… There always are the rich and the poor and despite all the pretensions beggars can’t be choosers.

[William2 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part One, the novel “The Last of Mr. Norris” (British title: Mr. Norris Changes Trains), was repudiated by the author who came to feel it regrettably out of sympathy with those who suffered during the Nazi period. That it’s a closeted novel—true allegiances hidden behind a veneer of heterosexuality—was problematic too. But what else, one wonders, was the author to do? At the time of its publication, 1935, homosexuality in Britain was a crime. (Look how they treated Alan Turing, arguably the war hero responsible for breaking the German’s Enigma cipher.) These publication matters aside, it should not be forgotten that TLOMN is a very good novel too.

In crazy Weimar Berlin, with street violence between Nazis and Reds as the background — and a bacchanalia almost constantly offstage — William Bradshaw, a tutor, meets the slippery Mr Norris on a train to Berlin. Mr. Norris appears to be a master swindler, though a highly anxious one, and quite queenly too. William finds him amusing and they become friends. This friendship consists of Mr. Norris almost constantly on the verge of homelessness and bankruptcy, hanging on by the skin of his teeth, untenably flush one moment, near impoverishment the next. Always conniving, always waiting for his ship to come in. Espionage ensues. Enormous fun.

Part Two, Goodbye To Berlin, is tonally darker than Part One, which often verges on the madcap.

“A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)” The narrator’s clothing is “baggy.” There’s one sequence in which his landlady tells him about her former lodgers by pointing out the stains they’ve left behind. So far it’s pretty much the same set up as Mr. Norris — the narrator is an English teacher, he lodges in the Berlin flat of one elderly Fräulein Schroeder, he’s well educated but has little money. So far the only difference is the narrator’s name; it’s no longer Bradshaw, now it’s “Herr Issyvoo” himself.

“Sally Bowles.” Critic Ingrid Norton, Wikipedia tells us, pointed out that "Breakfast at Tiffany's is in many ways Capote's personal crystallization of Isherwood's Sally Bowles." This is an observation hard to avoid. It’s so on the money. Sally Bowles cannot do without men. Her every thought is about capturing one. There is no thought about her becoming self supporting. She has no skills whatsoever, having been taught from birth that she must marry well. Despite disappointment after disappointment, there remains unending faith in men to save her. They never do.

(Later entry. Sally Bowles worldview is dependent entirely on fucking. Someone is getting something because they’re fucking someone, or they are in need of that thing because they’re not fucking him. Without fucking the world is pure inanition. Nothing gets done. Miracle cures aren’t developed etc.)

“On Ruegen Island (Summer 1931),” like Mr. Norris, is another closeted tale — no sex— though highly readable. Otto, Christopher, and Peter are vacationing at a Baltic resort. Otto is the young beauty. Peter is older and has money. The narrator, Christopher, is there to record it all. Peter is very jealous. And Otto is always out, dancing with the “girls,” catting around. It’s getting tiresome. Fortunately, I only have four more pages. Even the author seems aware of the desultoriness of the story.

“‘I wonder how much longer this will go on. . .’

"’As long as you let it, I suppose.’

"’Yes . . . We seem to have got into a pretty static condition, don't we? I suppose there's no particular reason why Otto and I should ever stop behaving to each other as we do at present. . . ‘ He paused, added: ‘Unless, of course, I stop giving him money.’

"’What do you think would happen, then?’

Peter paddled idly in the water with his fingers. ‘He’d
leave me.’”
(p. 97)

“The Nowaks” This is about Christopher slumming among the lower classes of Berlin. Otto, who was with Peter in the previous chapter, that scamp and heartbreaker, is a primary character here living with his family and great poverty.

“The Landauers” About a family of Jews, remarkable people, who Christopher goes to visit only because a woman acquaintance of his is a virulent antisemite. He has a letter of introduction from England he has been reluctant to use, now he does so. There is Natalie whom the author insists on having speak halting English. Herr and Frau Landauer: she, a stay at home migraineur; he, an international businessman facing expropriation by the Nazis, the so-called “Aryanization.”

Later, Christopher drives out one night with Herr Landauer’s nephew, Bernhard, a principal in the Landauer business. On arrival at a luxurious villa on Wannsee Lake, and after showing Christopher his room, Bernhard takes him down through the garden to a landing on the water. Here he speaks of growing up in the villa.

“His voice was pitched so low that I could hardly hear it; his face was turned away from me, in the darkness, looking out over the lake. When a stronger puff of wind blew, his words came more distinctly—as though the wind itself were talking: ‘That was during the War-time. My elder brother had been killed, right at the beginning of the War . . . Later, certain business rivals of my father began to make propaganda against him, because his wife was an English woman, so that nobody would come to visit us, and it was rumoured that we were spies. At last, even the local tradespeople did not wish to call at the house . . . . It was all rather ridiculous, and at the same time rather terrible, that human beings could be possessed by so much malice . . . .’” (p. 169)

Incidentally, it was here on the Wannsee, about ten years later (1942) — the story is set in the early 30s —that Nazis Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann and others would devise the Final Solution, planning for the extermination of the Jews. The story itself was first published in 1939. Whether this argues for authorial prescience or not, I don’t know — but some scholar does!

“A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3)”

Coda.

P.S. If you’re going to read this one, you might also be interested in Joseph Roth’s What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920 to 1933.

[Georgia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Berlin had affected me like a party at the end of which I didn’t want to go home,” Isherwood once said. By writing it down, it never ends. He passes it down to us like that recipe to cherish. Reading it is akin to eating a favorite dessert.

To start, there is Sally Bowles. She is light and fluffy and suffers not at all unlike Liza Minelli in Cabaret. She's also upper class and English, not American. She gets out of Germany before the war starts whereas the film suggests the singer stays on in Berlin. Other characters are rich in more ways than one. The rich man who seduces both Sally and Christopher is an American in Isherwood's book, not German. His getaway in either case spares him involvement in the war. So why bring up the war? Because it is sprinkled like chocolate and the taste of it lingers.

Anyone who still wonders how events can spin out of control should read. "[T]hese people could be made to believe in anybody or anything." And "The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been - "

I wanted to bask in Isherwood's good memories and forget the rest. But Isherwood doesn't let me. There is tragedy lurking in the words of a young Jewish woman who says "My father and my mother and I, we are not unhappy." Sleepwalkers, all of them. Or did they understand what really makes life good? Caring and kindness and love exist here, too.

When I finished, I felt the same as after eating tiramisu, that calorie bomb disguised as a light dessert, The Berlin Novels are a rich slice of history which surpasses any list of its ingredients. Read. And pass it on.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Contains Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin!

Mr Norris Changes Trains

The first part of Isherwood's iconic "Berlin Novels" tells the story of a young Englishman who lives in Berlin as a language teacher in the early 1930's, experiencing the rise of the Nazis. This narrator, William Bradshaw, is an alter ego of the author (full name: Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood) who came to interwar Berlin in search of freedom, adventure, and gay sex - and yes, the guy has to join the ranks of "problematic faves" because he famously took up with an underage street sweeper (see: Christopher and His Kind). Isherwood later condemned "Mr Norris changes trains" as "heartless", because he felt like at the time of writing, he did not truly understand the suffering of the people.

The novel was first published in 1935, and young Isherwood was a young, inexperienced, apolitical man and member of the discriminated gay minority when he came to the German capital - and while his perception regarding this novel is mostly certainly too harsh, it's true that the social circumstances function more or less as a backdrop to the main event, which is a spy thriller (but the passages that do describe the atmosphere are very well done, IMHO!). Protagonist Bradshaw meets the title-giving Norris (based on Gerald Hamilton) on a train from the Netherlands to Germany, and he is intrigued by the eccentric, mysterious traveler who seems to be involved in some kind of shady scheme. Bradshaw and Norris become friends, and our narrator finds himself in Communist meetings, in the midst of wild parties, and dining with nobility - but what's behind the enigmatic facade of the financially troubled, BDSM-loving, well-connected Norris?

Bradshaw is more a narrative tool than a character, serving to describe and ponder others who populate the scenes, and, of course, mainly Norris. I believe that there is great worth in having writers who hail from outside Germany and who witnessed the 1930's depict this time through their eyes, but the convoluted puzzle around Norris becomes more and more exhausting, while the political situation becomes more and more dangerous, but that doesn't translate enough to the story in the foreground which relies on enormous amounts of "tell, don't show".

To put it bluntly: Babylon Berlin is so much better, as it actually achieves what this novel aims to do. But then again, the writers of the series had almost 90 years of history between them and the events, while Isherwood published this four years before WW II.


Goodbye to Berlin

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.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Last of Mr. Norris (1935): 3 stars

Goodbye to Berlin (1939): 4.5 stars

I started this book before the events at Charlottesville; unfortunately, it proved timely. Based on his own experiences living in pre-WWII Berlin, Isherwood writes of the Nazis being talked of, even laughed at, at first; and by the book's end of their stalking the streets and terrorizing Jewish citizens, the police powerless to do anything about it. For the most part, though, that’s ‘just’ the background and atmosphere: character (in both senses of the word) is foremost in both of these works. Yet it’s because of what’s going on in the ‘background’ that the characters achieve their importance as they live their lives under, and in spite of, an increasing atmosphere of menace.

Your response to Isherwood’s characters will vary depending on your tolerance for ‘characters’, i.e. eccentrics, for lack of a better word. Mr. Norris of the first novella is not the kind of character I warm to, though perhaps it is more that this is an earlier work than the other, and with the latter Isherwood found his voice. In the second work, a collection of pieces that nevertheless make a coherent whole, the character of Sally Bowles is a revelation (she is not Liza Minnelli at all) and I was dismayed when her section ended—not to worry, she makes one more appearance. The other characters may not be as memorable as Sally (though all Isherwood's female characters are remarkable), but they and their stories are all part of the stage upon which Isherwood always gives himself a minor role.

The author’s preface tells of his first visit to Berlin since before the war, after the success of the Broadway play I Am a Camera, which was adapted from his story "Sally Bowles" and starred Julie Harris (whom he thought was more Sally than the ‘real’ Sally). During this 1952 visit, he hears the war stories of his indomitable former landlady, sees the places he’d lived in and hopes someone will, one day, write the story of the ‘new’ Berlin.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Norris Changes Trains

My first reaction was to feel, perhaps unreasonably, angry. I had to admit to myself that my feeling for Arthur had been largely possessive. He was my discovery, my property. I was as hurt as a spinster who had been deserted by her cat.

This is an immensely slippery novel which itself duplicates the complicated relationship between the narrator, William Bradshaw, and Arthur Norris. From a chance encounter on a train to Berlin, the two men, with thirty years between them, become friends - a relationship that in its obscurities, dangers and decadent moments seems to reflect Berlin in the early 1930s - deceptive, intriguing, obscurely sinister, on a path to something disastrous, with lives bloodied and lost en route.

I'm surprised to see some of the descriptions of Arthur Norris and the implications that other reviewers have suggested: for me he's a more pitiful figure, one with no attraction to the rising Nazi party, though his work on behalf of the communists is constantly shaded by self interest. Norris knows his own weaknesses: he is both blackmailer and blackmailed, he is proud of his single work of self-published pornography, he desires to live a life of luxury, good food and amusing company, with weekly appointments with his dominatrix, Anni.

But the time and place in which he lives impinges on his life and to sustain his lavish lifestyle Mr Norris drifts into dark methods of making money which he tries to not wholly acknowledge to himself. And it's this doubled -consciousness that most conveyed to me the self-deception of the era as the book moves towards the Reichstag fire and the increasing power of fascism while Norris and Bradshaw's acquaintances, queer men and communists, are pursued by the incoming Nazi regime.

Isherwood's writing is witty, engaging and subtle, from the broad comedy of Norris' wigs to the more subtle sadnesses of wistful romances and loneliness.

Goodbye to Berlin

'I feel as if I'd lost faith in men. I just haven't any use for them at all.

Sally Bowles is undoubtedly the star of this second novel set in early 1930s Berlin. Just nineteen, unashamedly on the make but all too easily deceived too, this book delights in the flamboyant relationship between Sally and 'Isherwood' but gives her a heart too in that brief moment when we see her yearning for a baby - even if she has to sleep with men to make the money to look after it especially poignant given that she's just aborted the baby.

More fragmented than Mr Norris, the delights of Frl. Schroeder are offset by the increasing brutality of the Nazi regime, culminating in the story of the Landauers, a Jewish family with whom 'Isherwood' is friends, who own a family shop.

It's interesting to see 'Isherwood's' gradual claim to socialism, modest as it is, and - even more - his defiant claim of being 'very queer indeed'. Berlin is more a character in this novel than in Mr Norris and the wider lens draws attention to the gradual destruction that is impinging on the life of its inhabitants. Of course, Mr Norris was already sensitive to the political climate but here we see the stranglehold of the Nazis tightening and 'Isherwood's' own fear and trepidation.

I'm so taken with these companion novels and can't believe it's taken me so long to get to Isherwood: now, I'm keen to read his Christopher and His Kind to understand more about the real people who inspired these fictional personages.

[BookMonkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS: 3.5🍌
GOODBYE TO BERLIN: 4.25🍌

When Christopher Isherwood left London for Germany in 1929, he was leaving the stifling moral environment of England for the freewheeling, decadent streets of Berlin where he could live more freely as not only a gay man but a young writer. Over the next several years he lived and wrote in Berlin, exploring the city's underground culture and keeping notes on the interactions he had with the city and its inhabitants; these notes he planned to transform into a massive, sprawling novel that would be called THE LOST. He was unable to do it. Instead, he carved those diaries into two separate short novels, THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS (originally titled MR. NORRIS CHANGES TRAINS) and GOODBYE TO BERLIN. These two books are often bundled together as one under the title of THE BERLIN STORIES.

Though the two novels are superficially very different, they share similar concerns. In THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, Isherwood's semi-autobiographical narrator, William Bradshaw, acts as a detached, Nick Carraway-like observer of the strange escapades of one Arthur Norris, a mysterious British ex-pat with an affinity for masochism, intrigue, and wigs. Norris is also involved in an elaborate plot involving the Communist movement in Germany that briefly flared in the late 1920s and early 1930s before being crushed by Hitler when the Nazis rose to power. Despite this ominous backdrop, the novel is rather delightful, with Bradshaw accompanying the delightfully wigged Norris on an at-times dazzling tour of underground Berlin. The plot, too, is underrated (though very different, I was put in mind of the works of Isherwood's friend Raymond Chandler while reading). (Tangentially, when Isherwood and Chandler first met in LA, Isherwood came away wondering if Chandler was gay.) All this said, the novel is a bit thin and, if one were honest, not especially well constructed, with a number of characters peppered in like afterthoughts, appearing once early in the novel and then reappearing toward the end in a gesture toward tying up loose ends. This I attribute to Isherwood's youth.

This same detached observer is present in GOODBYE TO BERLIN. Indeed, Isherwood tells us as much in the opening paragraph of the novel: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." This is misleading, as Isherwood's narrator actually thinks quite a lot throughout the novel (and of course there is no such thing as narrative objectivity), leveling incisive judgments across the book's six chapters as he introduces us to Berlin's 1930s red-light district and a cast of alternately quirky and doomed characters, including the infamous Sally Bowles, who would go on to be immortalized in the film Cabaret. As with THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, the hysteria-tinged nightclubs, underground bars, and restaurants of Berlin are the main characters of GOODBYE TO BERLIN, and there is a permeating sense of nostalgic melancholy that lends the novel a poignancy in light of what the reader knows -- and the narrator suspects -- will happen to everyone.

Isherwood's writing is precise, witty, and thoroughly enjoyable. What is most interesting about both novels is his delicate handling of homosexuality, which was illegal in his native England at the time of publication (even in Berlin the patrons of the gay bars are perpetually on the lookout for raids). Though it is quite apparent to even the least sophisticated reader that the majority of the male characters in these novels are either bisexual or homosexual, Isherwood never explicitly lets on to it, a stylistic tightrope-walking act that provides an underlying tension throughout.

This subtle treatment adds to the other obvious tension in these novels: the Nazi rise to power in the early 1930s. Both books are littered with insights and observations that are terrifyingly prescient in retrospect and relevant to today. In THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, the narrator describes the exhaustion of a public primed for a fascist takeover: "The Hessen Document [documents discovered in 1932 that outlined Nazi plans for a forceful coup] was discovered; nobody really cared. There had been one scandal too many. The exhausted public had been fed with surprises to the point of indigestion." And when the narrator urges a Jewish friend to take the Nazi threats on his business more seriously ("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.") it's impossible not to think of the talk show hosts, comedians, and majority of America who treated Trump's 2016 presidential campaign -- and presidency -- as a circus sideshow.

Yet here, perhaps, is also where Isherwood's "narrator as camera" mode exposes its limits. The faux-objective narrative ultimately affords the narrator the privilege of distance, and at various times it felt as though the ominous rise of anti-Semitic nationalism was treated almost glibly or as background inconveniences. As Isherwood would later say: "What repels me now about Mr. Norris is its heartlessness. It is a heartless fairy-story about a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation.... As for the 'monsters', they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy."

Still, as a window into a remarkable period in German and world history, as well as an entrée into Isherwood's larger oeuvre, THE BERLIN STORIES is well worth reading.

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a big Isherwood fan and have been since I read A Single Man several years ago. The Berlin Novels are comprised of two separate novels: Mr Norris Changes Trains (or, in the US, published as The Last of Mr Norris) and Goodbye to Berlin. The former has William Bradshaw as the narrator in 1930s Berlin, but it is, really, Isherwood himself. In fact, Isherwood's full-name is Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood. In Goodbye to Berlin, he drops the pretense and the narrator is Christopher Isherwood. Both portray Berlin in the 1930s. The most attractive thing about Isherwood is (as well as his beautiful, sharp writing) his humour and tenderness, which appears to run through all his novels. He's a pleasure to read. As I read them separately and some time apart, here are my separate reviews:

Mr Norris Changes Trains —4-stars
Goodbye to Berlin —5-stars

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

In current-day times, Christopher Isherwood could just as well walk around with his phone while working abroad, strike up conversations with strangers at parties, take abundant pics of his encounters, also featuring himself, and publish the results as so many instalments of a travelogue on his favourite social media account.

The scenes of Berlin he captured almost a century ago really are something of an equivalent. The author does appear in them, under his own name, and this may be fiction, but the characters are based on real-life experiences. Ignore the constant affectation in many of the story threads, and you’re left with a collection of finely detailed, yet dynamic and colourful observations on German households, expatriate work, conflicting politics and cultural differences, pre-Nazis.

Ignore the constant affectation if you can, that is. With characters like Arthur Norris, Sally Bowles and Otto Nowak, it quickly becomes impossible. In an act of love, Isherwood chose to depict old eccentrics, gold diggers and rent boys in a most favourable light, rendering them as merely amusing, most of the time, and an abundance of theatrics turns some of his more unlikely street portraits into so many other scenes of normal life – counterintuitively for me, yet successfully.

Counterintuitively, yes, but then again, just as Nazis were slowly rising to power, where else but the latter would Isherwood point when pressed to pass moral judgment on foreign political skies getting increasingly cloudy? On a ragtag parade of free souls and dreamers? Surely not. It feels to me like the author enjoyed a wonderful, liberating time in and around Berlin while it lasted; like he was welcomed into various people's everyday affairs, developing sometimes deep, sometimes fleeting connections as he went; his inspired stories capture this to perfection. Good for him, obviously.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Recently, I have had some interesting reading experiences with book choices for one of my Goodreads groups, Reading the 20th Century. A recent read was Dorothy Whipple’s, “Someone at a Distance,” which I initially thought would be boring, but found that I loved. Meanwhile, on paper, “The Berlin Novels,” looked like the type of book which would appeal to me. After all, despite the fact that I have watched virtually no films all the way through, I have seen, and enjoyed, “Cabaret,” which was taken from Isherwood’s novellas. Indeed, pre-war Berlin is a delightful, literary place to spend time. The sort of place where you can imagine Bernie Gunther propping up the bar at the Adlon, his eye on a pretty blonde and a nice, cool drink in his hand. Therefore, it is doubly disappointing that I really didn’t warm to this at all.

The first novella in this is, “Mr Norris Changes Trains,” where William Bradshaw encounters the sinister Mr Arthur Norris, on a train to Berlin. Despite Arthur’s obviously dubious behaviour, the fact that virtually everyone he meets warns him to stay away from him, and some bizarre acquaintances, William seems determined to befriend him. This did warm up once William heads to Switzerland, on a clandestine mission but, frankly, I wasn’t that interested, or involved, in what would happen.

I hoped for more from, “Goodbye to Berlin,” which involved a series of snapshots of Christopher Isherwood’s time in Berlin. There are familiar characters, such as Sally Bowles, and Isherwood spends time in various boarding houses, nightclubs and trips. Oddly, while describing one character, Bernhard Landauer, Isherwood writes that he remained, “remote from me – his face impassive.” Most of the time, I felt this way about the author’s portrayal of Berlin. He reports on the rise of Nazism, of the changing face of Berlin, but he never seemed personally involved. This book left me a little cold and I did not enjoy it – although I am pleased that I finally read it. It has shown me that reading groups can introduce you to some authors you would never otherwise try, and love; taking me out of my reading comfort zone. As such, I am delighted that Goodreads gives me the chance to interact with other readers, who constantly challenge and delight me, while introducing me to ‘new’ authors.

[Lisa Lieberman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm reading this alongside Isherwood's memoir, Christopher and His Kind for an upcoming column on the film Cabaret. So you might say I'm getting all the ins and outs of Weimar Germany, and set to music, no less! (*slaps own cheek* Did I say that?)

Isherwood's writing is so delightful, his characters so well-drawn and his portrait of Berlin so fascinating that you almost miss the despair, particularly in "Sally Bowles." It's hard to read that story without seeing Liza Minelli in your mind's eye and hearing the soundtrack from the musical running through your head. This isn't to say that there weren't dark elements in the movie, but they're not quite the same dark elements that Isherwood was working with in the 1930s, when he wrote The Berlin Stories.

He'd gone to Berlin in 1929 for one reason: the boys. He couldn't say this in the 1930s, when the stories were first published, or even in the 1950s, when a new edition came out. He said it in Christopher and His Kind. He was determined, finally, to be honest, to out himself fully. A Single Man marks the beginning of this process. "I think it’s the only book of mine where I did more or less what I wanted to do," he said in a 1972 interview in Paris Review.

ISHERWOOD

The man in A Single Man is a stoic, a very back-to-the-wall character . . .I really admire the sort of person that George is: It isn’t me at all. Here is somebody who really has nothing to support him except a kind of gradually waning animal vitality, and yet he fights, like a badger, and goes on demanding, fighting for happiness. That attitude I think rather magnificent. If I were in George’s place, I would think about killing myself because I’m less than George. George is heroic.

INTERVIEWER

Would you write more about homosexuality if you were starting out now as a writer?

ISHERWOOD

Yes, I’d write about it a great deal. It is an exceedingly interesting subject, and I couldn’t, or I thought I couldn’t, go into it. It’s interesting because it’s so much more than just “homosexuality”; it’s very precious in a way, however inconvenient it may be. You see things from a different angle, and you see how everything is changed thereby.

That's the thing: the younger, more circumspect Isherwood was terribly observant. He may have gone for the boys, but he couldn't help seeing everything else that was in front of his eyes, the plight of other marginalized members of society especially. His portrait of the "severely repressed homosexual" Bernhard Landauer, modeled, Isherwood tells us, on Wilfrid Israel, is complex, poignant. And yet it was dishonest, the older Isherwood admits. He's very hard on himself, for misrepresenting Wilfrid to make the story come out better ("The killing of Bernhard was merely a dramatic necessity. In a novel such as this one, which ends with the outbreak of political persecution, one death at least is a must. . . and Bernhard is the most appropriate victim, being a prominent Jew.") and for the more serious sin of having projected onto the character his (Christopher's) own insecurities.

I love Isherwood for his revisionism. He doesn't blame himself for not having seen the Holocaust coming. In fact, I think he finds this kind of foreshadowing (which was evident in the film) distasteful. Certainly he witnessed troubling acts of violence against Jews, and Communists. He describes these incidents, and the reactions of bystanders who muttered about the Nazis going too far this time without actually doing anything to stop them. "Allerhand," they say to one another, shaking their heads.

At times, toward the end of Berlin Stories, he allows a note of outrage to mar the surface of his smooth narrative:

This morning, as I was walking down the Bülowstrasse, the Nazis were raiding the house of a small liberal pacifist publisher. They had brought a lorry and were piling it with the publisher's books. The driver of the lorry mockingly read out the titles of the books to the crowd: "

Nie Wieder Krieg! he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile. Everybody roared with laughter.

"'No More War!'" echoed a fat, well-dressed woman, with a scornful, savage laugh. "What an idea!"

Isherwood was a pacifist, a conscientious objector during World War II. He worked with the Quakers in Pennsylvania, helping to resettle German-speaking refugees, and settled permanently in the United States after the war. He had the courage of his convictions, but he does not seem to have taken himself too seriously. There's a joyfulness that comes through even when he is being harsh with himself. Here's how he describes his working-class lover "Otto" (from "The Nowaks") in Christopher and his Kind:

His body became a tropical island on which they were snugly marooned in the midst of snowbound Berlin.

I will end here, with the sheer pleasure of reading Isherwood's prose.

[Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was again a new author for me and I found I quite enjoyed reading this. The first of the novellas the Last of Mr Norris reminded me very much of Travels with My Aunt. Mr Norris (who our narrator—a version of Isherwood—meets on a train) is a reprobate, and his dealings (and connections), almost always dubious. But our narrator takes to him in a sense and finds himself amidst (sometimes as a mere observer, but at others more involved) Norris’ life and friends—all with varying degrees of eccentricity—as Norris drifts from periods of relative luxury to penury, to places seedy or politically charged, but mostly from trouble to trouble (which seems to follow no matter where he goes. His adventures (and misadventures) are colourful, at times not particularly appealing, at others somewhat funny, but you can’t help but also feel a little sadness.

The second novella Goodbye to Berlin, I found much more melancholy throughout. This is more a collection of Isherwood’s stories, of his memories of Berlin just before the time Hitler came into power (the Nazis looming in the background seem so much more prominent in this collection than the first book)—of people, families, and places. Parts of Berlin seem to be crumbling, political struggles are on (the communists and Nazis both fighting for power, violence and hate in the atmosphere), others are simply struggling to make ends meet, some are coping with the hate that is spreading, and some with their personal struggles. Though there is a feeling of sadness in most of their stories, most of these people are eccentric in their own ways (may be more so than the first book), and they are all unique and interesting—they struggle but their struggles draw one in, make one read on. What makes the book feel much more sombre is the fact that you can’t get the thoughts of what is to come out of your mind as you read. So it really is a goodbye to Berlin, capturing various facets that were, and that weren’t likely to ever be again.

Large parts of the book are descriptive and because of this I was surprised at the pace—it always moves, paints vivid pictures, and keeps you reading even where for instance, he is writing about a club that has probably seen better days but is fighting on, putting up a brave face, going into action the moment some hope in the form of promising customers steps in. I probably may not have picked this up if it hadn’t been selected for a group read, but I came away quite glad that I read it.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 1 out of 5]

UPDATE Aug 2106 ... tried again ... just as boring

After starting with great expectations, I found "The Berlin Stories" to be incredibly boring. The GR reviews of the book were far more interesting (for me) than the book itself. I guess I like character development as an adjunct to a plot, but not so much all by itself. I found no reason to care about the characters and the minutia of their lives, no matter how well described they were. A pity, since so much was happening in Germany in the time period of the stories (early to mid 1930s). Hope I haven't hurt anyone's feelings.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Berlin Stories is a collection of two Isherwood novellas set in Berlin in the early 1930s. While enjoyable and "light," both stories have great depth because they contain an almost hidden background of Hitler's rise to power.

While I enjoyed the first novella (Mr. Norris Changes Trains) for its characterization and rather unexpected ending, it is the second novella I love.

In Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood masterfully uses dialogue to tell the story of the lively, erratic, optimistic Sally Bowles. In fact, as I read, I continually found myself with a silly smile on my face. If you liked Lisa Minnelli in Cabaret, you will love this book. Minnelli was the perfect choice for the role.

Highly recommended reading.


—————-

English author, Christopher Isherwood, intended to write a lengthy novel set in Berlin between the two world wars. Thankfully he failed. Instead, we have two short novels—Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin—that are often collectively called The Berlin Stories, novels which may be the definitive portrayal of a country rapidly descending into fascism as an authoritarian leader was poised to take power, novels that Time Magazine placed on the top 100 English language books of the twentieth century.

Even though these novels feel "light" because of Isherwood’s crisp, realistic, and modern use of language, they have a grim depth because they contain the almost hidden background of Hitler's rise to power and the county’s acceptance of it. They show the abnormal becoming normal.

While I enjoy Mr. Norris Changes Trains for its characterization and rather unexpected ending, it is the second novel—Goodbye to Berlin-- I love.
Christopher Isherwood was born on August 26, 1904, to an upper-middle class, land-owning, family from near Manchester, England. Isherwood, however, despised the landed gentry along with its repression, mores, privilege, and money. His first novel, All the Conspirators (1928) dramatized the struggle he had with his family and upbringing, a struggle which soon led him out of England.

In 1929, at the age of 25, Isherwood went to Berlin for a week to stay with his college friend, the poet, W. H. Auden. By his third visit that year, Isherwood decided to make Berlin his home. As he later wrote, “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.”

Setting off with two suitcases and a one-way ticket, Isherwood began his embrace of “the mystery-magic of foreignness.”

His decision to leave the traditions and structure of England was not based solely on his desire to explore his sexuality by having lots of sex with lots of men, but was also a conscious rejection of family and country. He was in search of a new direction. In fact, most of his best writing is about foreigners, outsiders, and exiles rejecting the world of their birth.

As an outsider, nationally and sexually, Isherwood could see the culture of Germany and the country’s conditions that “insiders” could not see. He later explained that it was his sexual orientation and decision to leave England that offered him a unique perspective forming the foundation of his creativity and work.

Isherwood’s time in Germany was during the Weimer Republic (1918-1933). Berlin, however, was the flourishing intellectual, scientific, and artistic hub of the Weimer Republic, and even the world. By 1920, it had become the largest city in Europe, but was also a city caught in the political and financial instability of the age. That instability was magnified by the Versailles Treaty which ended World War I.

Though Berlin was a progressive, “left-wing” city, there existed conflict and tension among communists, monarchists, fascists, socialists, and republicans. There was also high unemployment, high inflation, and depression. Many persons on “the Right” saw the city as decadent and overly tolerant of immigrants, Jews, eastern religions and philosophies, intellectualism, urban lifestyle, and open sexuality.

Isherwood later wrote, “Here was the seething brew of history in the making. A brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books.”

By the end of 1930, Isherwood had decided to permanently leave England and move to Fraulein Thurau’s boarding house at Nollendorfstrasse 17. It is the neighborhood as well as this boarding house populated with eccentric characters that provided young Isherwood with the material for his Berlin Stories, especially Goodbye to Berlin, probably his finest novel.

With interconnected stories, Isherwood describes his surroundings and tells the story of “lost” characters most likely to be destroyed by the Nazis coming to power. They describe a transition time when few seemed to see the grim and horribly evil future rapidly approaching.

Some of the characters include Natalia Landauer, a wealthy Jewish woman, and Peter and Otto, boyfriends struggling with their relationship during the rise of fascism. Two other characters include Fraulein Schroeder and Sally Bowles.
Isherwood’s landlady, Fraulein Thurau, was the model for Fraulein Schroeder who, like many others in dire financial straits, took on boarders. At first skeptical of Hitler, she eventually “thrilled with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like school-boys, because the Jews, their business rivals, and the Marxists…had been satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and the inflation, and were going to catch it.”

One of the boarders, Jean Ross, a poor cabaret singer and communist political activist who was good at picking up rich older men, became the inspiration for one of the most recognized characters in 20th century English literature—Sally Bowles. Though Ross later said she did not approve of Isherwood’s portrayal, she liked even less how film makers and playwrights portrayed her in I Am a Camera and Cabaret.

Isherwood’s two novels making up The Berlin Stories, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939)—established him as one of his generation’s leading writers as he portrayed a world on the brink of collapse. Drawing from his own life to a degree few other authors had done, these two books are among the best portrayals of that time and place. His work is also among the first to explore the intersection of autobiographical truth and fiction. (For a more autobiographical and frank view of the same time-period, see Isherwood’s memoir, Christopher and His Kind.)

By 1933, Isherwood could see the rapidly increasing danger of fascism and the possibility of war. He and his German draft-evading boyfriend--his first great love, Heinz Neddermeyer--left Germany in May and spent a few years wandering Europe searching for a place to live where they would not be harassed and Neddermeyer could avoid arrest. In 1937, however, Neddermeyer was expelled from Luxembourg and forced to return to Germany where the Gestapo arrested and sentenced him to hard labor and military duty. After the war, Neddermeyer married and moved to Switzerland. He and Christopher did not see each other again until 1952.

After Neddermeyer’s arrest, in 1939, Isherwood emigrated to the United States with his friend, W. H. Auden. After a move to California, Isherwood continued to write books, worked on scripts for Hollywood, and taught English at what is now California State University. He also became a disciple and practitioner of a mystic Hindu sect.

In 1953, at the age of 48. Isherwood met Don Bachardy, who was just 18 or 19. Despite their 30-year age difference, the two were together until Isherwoood’s death. Like Neddermeyer, Bachardy seemed representative of his nation. He was the All-American Boy. Because they could not legally marry, Isherwood adopted Bachardy in the late 1970s to offer him the legal and financial protections denied same-sex couples. Bachardy, a well-known portrait painter of the stars and politicians, continues to live in the house he and Isherwood bought in Santa Monica in in the mid-50’s. (For a documentary about the two men, see Chris and Don: A Love Story)

Isherwood, who once wrote, that “he liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives, and die in unknown graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots” died at the age of 81 on January 4, 1986.

The English author, Somerset Maugham, once wrote of Isherwood that “he holds the future of the English novel in his hands.” Sadly, Isherwood hit his peak early with the Berlin Stories--two novels that suggested a great writer in the making--and never quite met his potential as an author.

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent account of author's experience in Weimer's Germany & the start of Hitler's reign.

I find a lot of my books after hearing about them on OTR, generally when I hear the book adaption presented on these older radio shows. I was first introduced to Christopher Isherwood this way & had no idea that he wrote the book behind the the theatrical "I Am a Camera" (1951) & Cabaret Broadway musical (1966) & film (1972). "Prater Violet" was portrayed on OTR but I decided on "The Berlin Stories" first since it sounded really interesting. I also have other works of his younger years on my to read list on Goodreads. Isherwood was an Englishman who later became a naturalized American citizen & born in 1904, so he was in his twenties when he was living in the Weimar Republic. Isherwood was a homosexual & it is interesting how he mentions some friends being gay but he only jokingly mentioned this about himself & we are uncertain of his sexual stance. He lives in the Berlin district that is friendly to the gay lifestyle since the turn of the twentieth century & thus attracts him to Berlin. This is not the important thing in my view but what I like is his analogy in one of his stories where he was like a camera recording events to be printed later & deciphered later. All his stories in this book are from his experiences with people he met in Berlin during the early 1930's. He gives the reality of the poverty, sexual morals decline, the rise of anti semitism, the competing ideologies (SDP, Communism & Naziism) & society in general in Germany. I learned more about the events unknown to me before that contributed to the rise of Hitler's Germany which Isherwood highlights.

"The Berlin Stories" are a collection of his works; novel written in 1935 "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" & "Goodbye to Berlin" (1939). Mr. Norris Changes Trains is about an older man named Arthur who young William meets & becomes friends with but finds out that he is an opportunist in the end but with quite an interesting road to finding that out. He shows how Communism & Nazism are taken in by many Germans during theses tough post World War 1 years.

Goodbye to Berlin has several short stories which have some overlapping in other stories due to the people he is writing about show up there when significant but fresh in content.

A Berlin Diary - 1930- tells of his land lady & the people who boarded with Chris, one being a prostitute.Sally Bowles- this is based on his friendship with a loose woman who wants to be an actress & has almost zero morals. The abortion section of this story had me very depressed. Cabaret was based on this short story.

On Reuben Island - summer 1931- this story is about Chris & 2 other boys who are spending time as friends on this Island. It is interesting in the personalities of Peter & Otto which are different as night & day.

The Nowaks- is Otto family & Chris' friendship with this poor family.

The Laundauers- a Jewish family well to do store owners' family who Chris starts to be friendly with especially the daughter Natalia & the nephew Bernhard.

A Berlin Diary- Winter 1932- 1933; Chris sees the increase tension of all the political parties, his political friends & things he saw on the streets. All these stories gave an inside into Germany of this time & how it was able to close their eyes to all the atrocities. Not justifying anything because that can never be justified. It just so sad how a society can decline to such a degree & when morals are also in such a state also mixed with poverty, principles are no longer clear as they were before because things are no longer seen as black & white.

Excerpts---"The pension was run by a happy-go-lucky Englishman, who used to laugh at my industry and tell me I ought to go swimming, while I was still young, "After all, old boy, I mean to say, will it matter a hundred years from now if you wrote that yarn or not?"

"Yet she had been through as bad a time as any average Berliner: serious illness, poverty -- forcing her to move to this much smaller flat, where she nevertheless had to have one lodger in the only spare bedroom and sleeping in the kitchen ---then the war, and the last awful year of bombing, when she and the other tenants almost continuously in the cellar. "There were forty or fifty of us down there. We used to hold each other in our arms and say at least we'd all die together. I can tell you, Herr Issyvoo, we prayed so much we quite religious."

"The town was full of whispers. The told of illegal midnight arrest, of prisoners tortured in the S.A. barracks, made to split on Lenin's picture, swallow castor oil, eat old socks. They were drowned by the loud, angry voice of the Government, contradicting through it thousand mouths."

"There's lots of old scores being paid off nowadays,"

"This was the climax of my dream: the instant of nightmare in which it would end. I had an absurd pang of fear that they were going to attack us -- a gang of terrifying soft muffled shapes -- clawing us from our seats, dragging us hungrily down, in dead silence. But the moment passed. They drew back -- harmless, after all, as mere ghosts-- into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow."

"By this time, dozens of people were looking on. They seemed surprised but not particularly shocked --this sort of thing happened too often nowadays. "Allerhand..." they murmured. Twenty yards away, at the Potsdamerstrasse corner, stood a group of heavily armed policemen. With their chests out, and their hands on the revolver belts, they magnificently disregarded the whole affair."

"Only a week since I wrote the above. Scleicher has resigned. The monocles did their stuff. Hitler has formed a cabinet with Hugenberg. Nobody thinks it can last till the spring. The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been "kept in." This morning Goring has invented three fresh varieties of high treason."

"It's no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I heard her talking reverently about "Der Fuhrer" to the porter's wife. If anyone were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which change it's coat for the winter. "

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

I fell in love with Isherwood earlier this year when I read "A Single Man." So I couldn't resist when the book club chose The Berlin Stories. Even though I was vastly overcommitted I did it anyway. And I'm glad.

It's not as dark as so much pre-WWII writing is. That's because most pre-WWII writing was written post-WWII and takes a look at the oncoming darkness head-on. With Isherwood it really seeps in so slowly you don't notice.

It is a very youthful book, full of the kind of blase naivete that isn't anything like innocence. It is full of prostitutes, pimps, criminals and communists.

It was one of the few times I wasn't annoyed out of my mind by a non-entity narrator. Perhaps because the rotating cast of characters are so interesting. Even the ridiculous Mr. Norris.

I can't explain why it is that Isherwood and I connect. We just do. And I'm content to leave it at that.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whilst I wasn’t quite fanciful enough to expect Liza Minnelli and the Kit Kat Klub to be lurking among these pages, I did expect something a bit more… well, more.

For me, the power of The Berlin Novels lies solely in the combined temporal and geographical setting: the glittering metropolis of Berlin in the heady tail-end of Weimar Germany. It was a place of ostentation, sexual deviance and poverty - but desperate to reassert itself as an important modern city on the comeback from defeat and hyperinflation. All the while it was teetering on the brink of destruction; the Nazis and the Communists battled it out for power, shootings and riots were a normal occurrence and unemployment was rife.

What makes this novel so especially contextually fascinating is that it's a (thinly disguised) first hand account of not only the hedonism of cabarets and nightclubs, but the political situation at possibly the most pivotal point in history. Isherwood was drawn to the sexually overt culture of Berlin, seeking an escape from his very conservative and very English upbringing. Let me give credit where it is due: his descriptions of the nightlife are wonderfully vibrant and the colourful cast of characters are (mostly) entertaining. What didn’t work for me was the excessively detached style and the fact that references to the political situation appeared mostly as exposition, lacking the subtlety and nuance that Cabaret delivered so well.

Despite having raved about the setting, I can safely say that this was the only redemptive quality. Or, to put it more finely, my main criticism is the plot - or lack of it. Goodbye to Berlin comprises of six separate vignettes of life in and around Berlin, encompassing people of different class, sexuality, gender and nationality. Isherwood’s claim that they are loosely connected is a little specious: the links are tenuous. Characters make guest appearances outside of their dedicated narrative, but that’s about it. I don’t think that the vignette style entirely worked given that there was very little by way of compelling relationships or characters, elements that might otherwise have drawn some emotional investment. The interesting, witty or entertaining titbits or anecdotes were few and far between - I found some sections endlessly tedious and tiresome. Considering the madness and danger that charged the city at the time, this was shockingly sedate in places.

Mr Norris Changes Trains isn’t much more than a lukewarm and meandering character study that only ever dances round the themes of betrayal and political intrigue. Whilst the 'friendship' (wink wink) between the hapless Bradshaw and urbane Norris is entertaining, it always felt superficial. Throughout the entire novel, the relationship remains an ongoing enigma. Norris was potentially a very interesting character: he is himself a conundrum, a man of contradictions - why on earth would he even befriend Bradshaw in the first place?!! But the mystery that surrounds Norris is never entirely fruitful; his motives aren't clarified and Isherwood never gets to the crux of the Norris/Schmidt hoo-ha. In essence, the teasing intrigue doesn't mature into anything truly gripping - or satisfying.

A little underwhelming, even with the benefit of historical hindsight. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the accounts of wild raves and Isherwood’s uncanny prescience, but ultimately I expected more from a time so enriched with flourishing creativity and political instability. Cabaret, in contrast, is an absolute masterpiece; it extrapolates so powerfully from Isherwood's account and is genuinely one of the most moving films I have ever seen - please, please watch it.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isherwood’s The Berlin Novels explore the chaotic and troubling world of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany. The vignettes read like a collection of photographic snap-shots, illuminating the various characters Isherwood knew in 1930’s Berlin, as it has a strong autobiographical connection, Isherwood’s prose is simple and straightforward, his characters are a collection of various misfits and miscreants who populate the Berlin in which Isherwood lurched from one sordid adventure to another. From the unforgettable Sally Bowles to the lachrymose Bernhard Landauer, Isherwood has a gift for creating well-rounded and memorable characters within short spaces of time; that is his gift as a writer, his characters are often symbolised by their physical features or their odd quirks and eccentricities which Isherwood so cleverly conveys;
“Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is fair and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small, sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide disarming grin, which is much too innocent to be true. When he grins, two large dimples appear in his peach-bloom cheeks.”
“As intoxication proceeded, his face seemed to slowly disintegrate. A rigid area of paralysis formed around his monocle. The monocle was holding his face together. He gripped it desperately with his facial muscle, cocking his disengaged eyebrow, his mouth sagging slightly at the corners, minute beads of perspiration appearing along the parting of his thin satin-smoothed hair.”
Just as the Baron’s monocle is holding up the mask of politeness which hides the Baron’s sexual depravity, so Mr Norris’s sad, shifty light-blue eyes symbolise his shifty yet sympathetic character and Sally Bowles’s ugly, uncomely hands with their unflattering green nail polish show us the superficial and supercilious nature. Isherwood is strangely drawn to the garish characters that populate his novels; perhaps he is able to take inspiration from their many quirks, from the querulous Bernhard to the bossy Frau Landauer, the vulgar Otto and the Machiavellian Bayer, yet Isherwood is able to build or empathy and make us care for these characters, however distasteful some of their characteristics are, Isherwood is able to draw on their many human qualities, so when their fates are tragically overtaken by the Nazi regime which comes into power during some of the vignettes, the reader is distraught the realise that the light of the eccentric yet sensitive Bernhard Landauer or the bellicose yet brave Otto have forever been extinguished, both in the real world and in the novel. This point is made most poignant by the scene at the end of the book, when a group of German Jews throw a party, oblivious to the dark tide which is about to engulf them and which will drown out their existence. Isherwood is the fishermen who is able to draw out these characters from his memory and imagination and preserve them for the reader, these characters whose existence would have otherwise been wiped out by the relentless cruelty of the Nazi regime.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodbye to Berlin is one of the best stories - actually series of stories - that I’ve ever read. George Orwell described Isherwood’s work on Berlin in the early 1930’s as “brilliant sketches of a society in decay”. It makes up the second half of this book.

I was pleasantly surprised at the humor present in these stories despite the ominous backdrop. I was impressed with Chris’s genuine attraction to most of these flawed German characters. His clear eyed view of Hitler’s Fascists and their propaganda led him to believe that even average citizens could be easily corrupted. Very prescient book and written before the Nazis had committed their most evil deeds.

The first half of the book is the novella ‘Mr. Norris Changes Trains’. It is also quite good perhaps somewhere closer to 4 stars than 5 stars. But its magic is not because of the story itself - Mr Norris gets himself into a lot of trouble with the Communists - but because Isherwood has an amazing gift at character development and painting scenes.

I also had the pleasure of watching Fosse’s Cabaret for the first time shortly after reading this book. It is loosely based on the character Sally Bowles and a few of the characters including Chris. It was delightful, especially the Cabaret scenes with Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli. But the book is better.

5 stars. Highly recommended.

[Katerina · Rating 4 out of 5]

We returned to the sitting-room, followed by Hermann with the tray. “Well, well,” observed Mr. Norris, taking his cup, “we live in stirring times; tea-stirring times.”

Начинала эту книгу, чтобы освежить свою коллекцию малой прозы, а оказалось, что это не сборник рассказов, а неожиданно два романа.

Действие обоих происходит в тридцатые годы в Германии, герои частично пересекаются. Второй роман носит подзаголовок The Berlin Diary и формально более автобиографичен, но мне понравился чуть меньше (за исключением главы Sally Bowles). Поэтому подробнее остановлюсь на первом.

The Last of Mr. Norris повествует о слегка эксцентричном, экстравагантном, элегантном англичанине средних лет, который часто говорит er, имеет туманное прошлое, парик и множество интересных знакомств:

”I always say that I only wish to have three sorts of people as my friends, those who are very rich, those who are very witty, and those who are very beautiful. You, my dear William, belong to the second category.”

Рассказчик Уильям познакомился с Артуром в поезде, когда тот вдруг необъяснимо засуетился при прохождении таможенного и паспортного контроля. В Берлине Уильям, подрабатывающий репетитором английского (больше про него почти ничего не известно) приходит к Артуру на чай и погружается в мир богемы, интриг и коммунистической агитации:

Several hours later I woke to find myself lying curled up on the floor, with my face pressed against the leg of the sofa. I had a head like a furnace, and pains in every bone. The party was over. Half a dozen people lay insensible about the dismantled room, sprawling in various attitudes of extreme discomfort. Daylight gleamed through the slats of the venetian blinds.

Мне кажется, обаятельный, отзывчивый, но суетливый и слегка растерянный Артур Норрис во многом послужил прототипом или вдохновением Эндрю Грееру: уж очень его Arthur Less похож на героя Ишервуда. Мистер Норрис своими манерами и речами напоминает какую-то тетушку из прошлого века, которая без устали поит всех чаем, соблюдает приличия и отличается очень деликатным здоровьем и душевной организацией – что не мешает ей выступать на партийных съездах с пламенными речами, косвенно участвовать в вербовке и контрабанде и иметь злобного демона в качестве секретаря. Мудрым высказываниям Артура могла бы позавидовать вдовствующая герцогиня из Аббатства Даунтон.

Единственная моя претензия к роману озвучена одним из героев Тима О'Брайена в The Things They Carried. Там сослуживцы собираются вокруг костра в походном лагере и травят байки. Один рассказывает историю, которая заканчивается так «и больше я его никогда не видел; конец». Как это конец, возмущается один из слушателей?! Ну так, я же говорю, больше никогда его не видел, не знаю, что с ним стало. А мне не важно, знаешь или не знаешь, раз уж ты рассказываешь историю, ты обязан рассказать ее до конца. Не знаешь – придумай, но читателя не томи.

Вынуждена со вздохом сообщить, что Ишервуд и его герои-рассказчики порой так же преступно пренебрегают этим золотым правилом.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

To appreciate this book, you have to read it all and then go back to Isherwood’s introduction. The tone is formal in a way we don’t see much in modern novels. It isn’t just the full sentences and actual punctuation; it’s that Isherwood takes time in not just character development, but also in showing the situation that accepted, then launched, Nazism in 1930-32 Berlin.

Isherwood shows Berlin on edge. It is a world of rented rooms, where the land lady may provide breakfast and draw the baths for those who scrape to pay a marginal rent. Former gentlemen, beautiful women and unemployed laborers have become grifters. There is gravitation to some philosophy which could be communism, nazism, nihilism, etc.

Nazi ideas are first shown as tangential to the stories and grow as the book goes on. You see them in how kids play, how young men congregate on the street and through small talk. The last story, “The Landauers” shows how the early symbols became a deadly movement with real life consequences. As in real life, you can only wonder (like Isherwood) what has become of many of the characters (he developed based on real life experience) as they lived through the horrors yet to come.

I understand why this is a classic, but appreciation takes the full 400 pages. Many, if not most, modern readers will not stay to get Mr. Norris off his first train.

[Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first read this book thiry years ago, being most concerned with the Sally Bowles/"Cabaret" connection, and loved it. Upon re-reading it again so many years later, I can appreciate it even more. It's a wonderful book. Isherwood is a marvelous writer, and he gives us an invaluable opportunity to time travel back to the last days of the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, with its "divine decadence," its joyful sexuality, its economic and political unrest, and its odd innocence before Hitler seized power. Isherwood's vignettes are very touching, very funny, and, given our current political climate, very unsettling. Read it.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a teenager, I was knocked out by this book. I recently reread it, this time while actually visiting Berlin. Sure enough, the stories echo eerily with the bloody history the city has recently acknowledged with various museums and monuments. As literature, I was relieved to discover the novels hold up and the characters remain as lively as ever. GOODBYE TO BERLIN is more elegantly constructed and satisfying than THE LAST OF MR NORRIS, but the two books work beautifully together as a diptych. Impressed by Isherwood's casually brilliant structural finesse in fitting them together.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the autumnal warmth of the 2005 Puja holidays, as the streets of Kolkata shimmered with lights and dhaaks beat through the night air, I sat curled up with a book that smelled of smoke and ghosts—The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood. It was an odd choice, I suppose. While outside, the city celebrated mythic victory over evil with colours, idols, and late-night revelry, I was wandering the smoke-stained cafés and brothels of pre-war Berlin, hand in hand with doomed characters trying to sip from life while the sky darkened overhead.

The Berlin Stories—a volume that brings together Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin—isn’t just fiction. It is reportage rendered poetic. A memory filtered through irony. A warning wrapped in wit. Isherwood, forever self-effacing, presents himself as a mere observer—a camera with its shutter open, recording but not judging. And yet, what he captures is profoundly human: fear, flamboyance, political rot, and the last wild dance before the silence of jackboots.

In Mr. Norris Changes Trains, we’re introduced to Arthur Norris—a character so camp, so evasively charming, that he teeters on the edge of farce. He’s a con man, a communist, a fetishist, a man with a permanent nervous smile and dubious associates. And the narrator, an English writer loosely modeled on Isherwood himself, is drawn in not with moral fervor, but with a kind of amused detachment. Here, Berlin is not yet terrifying—it is absurd. Dangerous, yes, but in a comic opera way. There's a sense of surreal levity in the espionage, in the shifting alliances, in the masks everyone wears. It’s a political novel that laughs quietly before it bleeds.

But Goodbye to Berlin—oh, that’s where the light dims. Composed of loosely connected sketches, it's less a novel than a series of haunted Polaroids. The tone shifts, sharpens, softens. Here we meet Sally Bowles—the immortal bohemian cabaret singer with green nail polish and a longing for sensation. But unlike her later incarnations on stage and screen, the Sally of the page is more brittle than brilliant, more lonely than luminous. She’s not a star. She’s a cracked mirror, reflecting the decay around her.

It is in Goodbye to Berlin that the real horror of the era creeps in—quietly, almost politely. A neighbor is evicted. A friend disappears. A Jewish family begins to feel the tremors of state hatred. And the narrator? He watches. Notes. Records. That iconic line—"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking"—is both chilling and courageous. It asks: how much can one witness before one becomes complicit? Is observation a form of cowardice? Or is it, in the face of distortion, a form of preservation?

Reading it as a twenty-something, I was torn. I admired Isherwood’s restraint, his refusal to dramatize. But I also felt the weight of his passivity. Could I have been that camera? Would I have looked away? I remember closing the book one evening while fireworks burst outside—Kali Puja in full swing—and feeling unnerved by the simultaneity of celebration and catastrophe, past and present, light and looming darkness.

Berlin in the early 1930s, as Isherwood presents it, is not a city—it’s a metaphor for fragility. Everything feels tentative: the politics, the friendships, even the sexuality. Men kiss in shadows. Women smile through hunger. Rooms echo with forgotten music. There is beauty, yes, but it’s the beauty of a chandelier moments before the ceiling collapses.

And yet, Isherwood never indulges in despair. He writes with clarity, wit, and a strange affection for even his most hopeless characters. There is a kind of grace in the way he lets them exist—not as heroes or villains, but as people trying to stay afloat in a sea of uncertainty. The writing, deceptively simple, carries the emotional charge of someone who knew that memory is both a refuge and a reckoning.

Nearly two decades later, I still think of The Berlin Stories as one of the most quietly devastating books I’ve read. It showed me how fiction can photograph history, how characters can carry eras inside them, and how detachment can itself be a kind of emotional overload.

It taught me that cities don’t fall in a single moment—they rot slowly from the inside, as laughter becomes thinner, as neighbors whisper a little less, as silences deepen. And perhaps most frighteningly, it reminded me that the apocalypse doesn't always announce itself with bangs—it sometimes comes disguised as another evening in Berlin, another girl singing in a club, another man walking home with his collar turned up, unaware that history has already chosen him.

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE BERLIN STORIES is a composite of two works, the short fictional work, THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS, and the autobiographical fragment, GOODBYE TO BERLIN. I confine my review to the diaries.

Christopher Isherwood turns an unflinching eye on Berlin from 1930-1933. It is a diary of his stay and the cross-section of society he encounters as he roams between his lodgings in a claustrophobic hovel to the hedonist dens around the city. Both the people and the scenery are described with such magnification of detail the reader is both repulsed and mesmerized. With the wisdom of hindsight, we become convinced we are witnessing the tipping point in the year 1930.

The most memorable character we meet is Sally Bowles. Barely 20, she lives off the allowance sent by her parents who believe she is traveling with a girlfriend. Though not a native Berliner, this glamorous bit of cafe life floatsam entertains us with her emotion-charged fantasies. In his landlady's parlor, Isherwood recalls: “Sally told some startling lies, which she obviously for the moment half believed...” It is a life that celebrates ephemeral gaiety without thought of any consequence at a time when the political climate is filled with nothing but consequence.

Another memorable character is Bernard Landauer, the serious and reticent cousin of one of Isherwood's student. Landauer is a jew, a prominent manager of Landauer's department store. He is a puzzle to Isherwood, at once both reserved and warmly hospitable. When he confides that he has been receiving death threats, Isherwood voices all the usual politely soothing words. Bernard reflects fatalistically: “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....” (p.179) This was in the spring of 1932. By May of 1933 we learn he is dead. Our shock and regret is as much from the way we learn about it as the event itself. Isherwood overhears the gossip of two Austrians in Prague. “'He's dead....Heart failure!' The Austrian shifted uneasily in his chair....'There's a lot of heart failure,' said the fat man, 'in Germany these days.' ….'If you ask me,' said the fat man, 'anyone's heart's liable to fail, if it gets a bullet inside it.'” (184) It's part of a conversation that's both perceptive and callous simultaneously.

Not all of the diary is riveting material. I could have done without the 1931 summer with Peter and Otto. However, it does serve as an introduction to the Nowak family Isherwood later lodges with. It also allows us to glimpse the ferrety doctor on the island who offers the unsolicited observation that Peter has a “criminal head.” His remedy is discipline. “These boys ought to be put into labour-camps.” (89). So much for the voice of “respectability.”

One final excerpt from Isherwood's lens demonstrates his ability to set a scene. “But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood – the Tiergarten. At this time of the year the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food and work. But the city, which glowed so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and damp. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert.” (187)

Isherwood is an acute observer and fine writer. The evidence is the resonance we still feel for the characters and time he writes about here.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now that I'm no longer reviewing 200 contemporary novels every year for the CCLaP website, 2018 has been giving me a chance to go back and read a lot of classic books I've never gotten around to reading before; in January, for example, I finally took on what's now known as The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, which started life as the two short novels The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which aren't actually novels at all but rather collections of related short-story-style vignettes. It's mostly known now for being one of the first books to explicitly examine the growing threat of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, a first-person survey of the creative chaos of Weimar Germany that was used as the source material for the '70s musical Cabaret; and while, yes, the book does mention Nazis here and there, I was surprised to learn when finally reading it that it's much more a deep, poetic examination of complex character, a look by Isherwood at the fascinating, complicated real people he was surrounded by during his youth as an openly gay liberal artist, during a brief window in Germany's history when such a thing was openly tolerated.

As such, then, Isherwood's sensitive writing covers everyone from the wilting hothouse flowers of the former aristocracy he was hired to teach English to, to the petty criminals now attracted to the burgeoning Communist Party (and the manipulative intellectuals who were their supervisors), the charming rogues who ran Germany's thriving inter-war black market, and the many still-closested homosexuals who used all these devices as a way to facilitate then hide their illicit gay affairs. Yes, Nazis pop up in the middle of these shenanigans on a regular basis; but Isherwood's point was much more to focus on these particular people themselves, in prose that is both plain-spoken and wonderfully dripping in Romantic melancholy, the equivalent of watching a teenage girl in a white dress stand in the middle of a rainstorm, patiently waiting for a lover who will never arrive. Come for the delicate examination of the social experiment that produced Weimar Germany; stay for the look at the violent right-wingers who ruined it all.

[Andrew]

It's hard not to romanticize/fantasize about living in Weimar-era Berlin... the art, the decadence, the imminent doom of a society that will be genocided and then bombed into nothingness. And I'm totally a sucker for it too. Isherwood hits all the right bullet points for this romantic image-- stoic Jewish families staring at the dawn of the Third Reich with brave faces on, exuberant youthful communists, expatriate actresses, Nazi landladies, independently wealthy sadomasochists, and prostitutes whose hearts are made of nothing even close to gold. Witty, often poignant, and very, very fun.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly preferred "Mr. Norris Changes Trains" over "Goodbye to Berlin," mainly because Norris is such a fun and ridiculous character to follow around.

[P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mr. Norris Changes Trains is an account of the narrator's intriguing friendship with a shady Mr. Norris. The narrator is an Englishman in Berlin, and of his own life we only get faint clues. Norris takes the centerstage and the story revolves around him. Communism in pre-war Berlin is one of the themes here while a major chunk of the story is devoted to parties and character sketches. It is still pretty entertaining and makes for a great light read.

Goodbye to Berlin is a collection of six pieces (David Mitchell's favourite structure) set in the same background as Mr. Norris. Some are more impactful than others, but overall they're very well-written. I've only read Isherwood's A Single Man prior to this and it's interesting to know the kind of less austere books he'd authored in his early days. Also, it's fairly obvious that these characters are queer and I'm very curious to know how these books were received at their time of publication.

[Siobhán McIlveen · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Goodbye to Berlin’ ? More like ‘Hello to Berlin’ ! (I’m going there on Thursday)

Ps: I brought back star ratings bc yes they are arbitrary but they’re easier than coming up with a whole review thingy… Thank you for supporting me during my time of pomposity 🙏🏼