izaro’s Reviews > Goodbye to Berlin > Status Update

Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. [...] She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.

‘The problem is not so simple. I’m afraid that most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve.’

‘Sometimes I almost despair,’ he added. ‘It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world today.’

‘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 . . .’
Uy, a quién me recordará... sobre la gente que parece tonta y graciosa, pero luego ideológicamente es muy peligrosa... empieza por i y termina por sabeldíazayuso...

Over there, in the city, the votes were being counted. I thought of Natalia: she has escaped – none too soon, perhaps. However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch.

I didn’t flatter myself that Natalia had ever wanted me as a lover, but she had certainly begun to behave towards me as a kind of bossy elder sister, and it was just this rôle – absurdly enough – which Sally had stolen from her.
QUé egocéntrico este tío, onvre tenía que ser.

Dios mío qué pesada es Natalia Landauer.

‘Your dramatist Oscar Wilde . . . this is another case. I put this case to you Mr Isherwood. I should like very much to hear your opinion. Was your English Law justified in punishing Oscar Wilde, or was it not justified? Please tell me what you think?’