Goodbye to Berlin [Paperback]

Originally published in 1939, the vignettes which form this book were based on the period (1930-33) Isherwood spent in Berlin that coincided with the Nazi ascension to power. It exists uneasily somewhere in the grey zone between memoir and fiction. Taking a cue from Dos Passos' USA trilogy (whose fist volume came out in 1930, and which he certainly would have read), Isherwood described his writing as "I am a camera with its shutter open", thereby ostensibly branding it documentary in nature. The episodes certainly read as a straight memoir would, and since the narrator of each piece is called Christopher Isherwood, it's hard not to take them as such. But however much is fictional, and whatever else it may be, the book functions today as a time capsule of a society on the brink of horrific change. And it derives no little drama from our knowledge of what was to happen to that society over the next 15 years. Of course, it also endures in fame as the base material from which the musical/film Cabaret was formed, as well as the earlier play/film I Am a Camera.

The pieces run chronologically, beginning with "A Berlin Diary", which introduces the reader to the city, and to Isherwood's hand-to-mouth existence as an freelance English tutor and lodger in a low-end guesthouse. The idea is to introduce various colorful characters, such as the landlady and his fellow lodgers (a prostitute, a bartender, a music-hall singer, and a traveling salesman), and acclimate the reader to the setting. Next is "Sally Bowles", certainly the most famous of the stories, and featuring the most famous of his characters. I wasn't particularly engaged by the story of the 19-year-old English golddigging"actress", nor did it make a whole lot of sense as to why Isherwood would go to such effort to remain friends with such a self-absorbed chit of a girl. "On Ruegen Island" takes place at a vacation spot in northeastern Germany, on the Baltic Sea. It is primarily the story of Isherwood's English friend, and the young working-class German man he becomes infatuated with. It's a well-drawn, but almost cliche portrait of the neurotic, insecure sugar-daddy, his freeloading, bisexual plaything, and their dysfunctional mind games.

In the next story ("The Nowaks"), Isherwood catches up with this same dissolute hustler in Berlin, and ends up lodging with his family. This is an opportunity to sketch out daily life in an even lower-class milieu. This contrasts nicely with the next story, "The Landaurers", in which Isherwood becomes friends with a rather intense young Jewish woman from a wealthy merchant family. Here, Isherwood actively dislikes the young woman, and yet still cultivates her acquaintance for some reason. That reason may be the "friendship" he develops with her breezily cynically world-wise cousin Bernhard. There's something somewhat unsettling in Isherwood's offhand characterization of Bernhard's"Eastern" inscrutability and repeated references about how one could never really "know" what was going on in his head. These sound awfully like some of the classic stereotypes of Jews, and one wonders to what extent Isherwood harbored his own upper-class instilled prejudices. (This may be discussed in Peter Parker's Isherwood: A Life Revealed, but I'm not interested enough to track that down and check.) In any event, the contrast between the poor Nowaks and the wealthy Landaurers serves to highlight the growing Nazi menace, and Isherwood sees the writing on the wall in his final diary farewell.

The collection seems destined to be lauded ad nauseam as a fond farewell to the seedy, corrupt side of Weimar-era Germany and its fun-loving group of nightlife denizens: gay hustlers, women on the make, communist poseurs, and so on, all of whom would soon disappear or become reinvented under a completely different kind of of Nazi decadence. However, it's not at all clear to me from this that the Berlin of that time was markedly different from other large European cities of the time. Certainly Paris and other cities had a thriving "underground" scene at the same time -- Berlin's claim to fame (indeed a large portion of why Isherwood went there), was the steady and cheap supply of young boys, kind of a pedophile's paradise. In any event, those interested in the Berlin of that era may want to tackle Alfred Dobin's massive masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, which channels 1920s Berlin through the eyes of an ex-con.

I was never one for audio books, I thought they were for people too lazy to read the real thing, and that many of them were read without feeling or emotion and sounded a bit like my 9th grade English teacher reading the death of Mercutio scene from Romeo and Juliet. But the combination of one of my favorite books and my favorite actor (Alan Cumming) led me to even buy used to hear what it sounded like. The search was well worth it! Alan puts so much into this brilliant recording. He intimately entwines you in the world of pre-war Berlin before the deluge. He is utterly witty handling the character of Fraulein Schroeder, uproariously funny with the famous Sally Bowles, and when he is Chris the narrator of the book, he takes you on a rollercoaster of emotions, from joy to sorrow to everything in between. Alan knows the book so well as if he came from that world. He captures your attention for the 3 hours that the running time is, and for 3 hours does NOT disappoint! If you're fortunate enough to be able and get a copy of this, I know you'll agree with me, and in the meantime they have to start reprinting this gem among literary and performance gems!

The opening page of Goodbye to Berlin contains one of the Twentieth Century's most famous sentences: 'I am a Camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' One of the most famous, yet also most disengenuous sentences. For Christopher Isherwood might have wished readers to think that his authorial persona - wry, detatched, passive, laconic - was actually his real personality, but we know the reality - lithe and limber boys in bathhouses, for instance - was rather more colourful. In the end, Isherwood couldn't distinguish between what was real, and what was a product of his imagination, the two bled into each other, giving result to an immaculate set of writings from his Berlin period when he was living poor in guesthouses, teaching English and recording the final months of early thirties Berlin Bohemia with the menacing shadow of Hitler imposing on the edges, and moving ever more darkly towards the centre.

Goodbye to Berlin contains some of Isherwood's choicest writings. There is the memorable tale of Sally Bowles, a feckless slightly aristocratic girl who sleeps with producers in the hope of making her big break and sings clubs (badly) in the evening. Her story inspired the musical 'Cabaret', and Isherwood creates a superb portrait of a young glamorous woman using her transient sex appeal to manipulate men and their emotions.

What Kingsley Amis described as Isherwood's 'boyhorn' features, with a tale of Otto and Peter, a quarreling gay couple who struggle with their sexuality in the homophobic atmosphere of pre-war Berlin. Then there is Natalia Landauer, the rich Jewish Heiress of a wealthy family, and the poor and Frau Schroder, the plump, caring landlady who is intrigued by the patrician Isherwood and is enthralled by his stories 'Quite right Herr Isssyvoo!'

The passive prose style is a perfect foil for this decadent era in Weimar Germany. The people Isherwood describes are often selfish and feckless, but always bursting with humanity. The book concludes with a description of Jewish shop owners suffering increasing intimidation for Nazi bully boys.

The back end of that famous camera sentence: 'one day this will have to be recorded and fixed'. Well now that period is fixed in history. We know what all this decadence ran into. For that, Goodbye to Berlin makes very poignant and powerful reading.

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