‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’, starts Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, an autobiographical collection of loosely connected stories from the author’s time living in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. Observing is indeed what he does: the decadent nightlife, the discontent and poverty of the working class, and most chillingly, the sinister beginnings of persecution of Jews. It’s a dark but also comical book with the author playing a supporting role to an eccentric gallery of characters. A quirky and notable classic.
The most eccentric of them all is Sally Bowes, an upper-class, renegade British socialite who turns out to be extraordinarily fickle and manipulative. Sally works as a cabaret singer in seedy clubs (she’s later the model for the protagonist in the musical Cabaret), sleeps with anyone she comes across and is perpetually broke.
When he’s not being flattered or humiliated by Sally, Christopher oscillates between the Nowaks, a poor working-class family, with whom he lodges for a while, the Landauers, wealthy Jewish department store owners, and as a spectator to the love drama between the youngest son in the Nowak family, Otto, and his friend Peter.
Christopher’s work as an English teacher gets him access and his English gentleman demeanour generates fascination, and perhaps a dash of envy, from the likes of Mr Landauer, who continuously mocks him.
‘You, Christopher, with your centuries of Anglo-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Carta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.’
Isherwood’s sexuality will be well-known to anyone who has read A Single Man, one of my all-time favourite books and widely considered to be the first gay novel. One of the reasons Isherwood moved to Berlin was the sexual freedom it offered. But Goodbye to Berlin was written in the early 1930s, more than 30 years before, and his gayness is only hinted at here.
Isherwood left Berlin not long after writing this book, horrified by the Nazification he had witnessed and just in time to avoid Germany’s fall into the precipice. At a party organised by Mr Landauer, Christopher presciently observes:
‘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.’
Sadly, he was right.
If you like Isherwood, try A Single Man and if you are interested in this period, don’t miss two other of my all-time favourites, The World of Yesterday by Stephan Zweig and The Hare With the Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal.
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood is published by Vintage Classic, 252 pages.
