Goodbye to Berlin

This slim volume contains a set of intertwined stories about Berlin in the waning days (and nights) of the Weimar Republic. It is chiefly remembered today because of the electrifying performance of Liza Minelli bringing Sally Bowles to life in the film Cabaret. As good as the film was, it’s interesting to read the book and get a different take on Sally, part of whose charm is that she is not a good singer. Nor does she bed the protagonist to “cure” him of his homosexual yearnings. In fact, Sally, while a vivid character, is not as central to the book as she is to the film.
The stories are narrated in the first person by a fictional protagonist bearing the same name as the author. A failure of imagination, or a desire to have the show more reader understand these vignettes as reportage rather than fiction? The latter might be a mistake; the woman on whom Sally is said to be modeled famously distanced herself from the depiction, denying any similarity between herself and that character.
So why did the author give the narrator his own name? He is presented as a curiously passive individual, and the opening of the book indicates this may have been intentional: he is simply a camera, his aim merely to record what he sees. What he sees is the seedy glamor and grinding poverty of a city in a whirling hedonistic fling, smacking of desperation bordering on hysteria, before it yields itself to the embrace of the brown-shirted devil.
Some of the portraits are vivid. In addition to Sally, the author has created other unforgettable characters such as Natalia Landauer and her cousin, Bernhard, as well as the lazy teen gigolo, Otto Nowack.
The author’s tone is elegiac, particularly in the impressionistic closing chapter, which contains some of the best writing of the book. He hints at the fate of the characters he portrays without, in most cases, spelling it out. Fate seems to be the key word: his mood is fatalistic. Any similarity between Berlin in that winter of discontent and election-year USA only reinforces this mood in the mind of the reader. A very good read. show less

I liked this book, but I feel like this book benefits from undeserved poignancy. When the Sally Bowles is introduced, one cannot help but imagine a young and effervescent Liza Minnelli. When the first Nazis turn up in street scenes, ones stomach contracts with eerie foreboding. But what if I hadn't seen the film Cabaret? What if WWII hadn't broken out a few years after the author left Berlin? Would we all find it just as good a book on purely literary merits?
Probably not. The author candidly reveals that these are six fragments which were supposed to be parts of his great Berlin novel - but he never managed to finish that task. A bit more than vignettes, a little bit less than short stories, these fragments don't really satisfy. What show more most bothered me was the underdeveloped psychology of the characters. Many of them are emotionally stunted and speak in elliptic sentences, but the narrator unfailingly detects their ulterior meanings - it's just a pity that he so rarely shares these findings with the readers, who may be left wondering whether they themselves are too dim to read between the lines, or whether the emperor is wearing any clothes at all and it's just bluff by an author who - maybe - understands the psychology of repressed male homosexuality but little else. And yet, I enjoyed this book: as a story, and as a nicely written historical document on the changing of the times during the 1930s in Berlin. The book was published in 1939, so it doesn't suffer from any teleological views that would already incorporate an inevitable world conflagration. And yet so many signals were already there, and have clearly been described in the background of these stories. show less

These are stories about life in the demi-monde of Berlin in the early years of Nazi rule.

I thought the book would be sleazier, but it's actually very touching. These are people who don't want to accept the mundanity of conventional life. They want to test their boundaries, live differently, and know they can say they experienced life. There is an edge of sadness to all their stories. The desperation of wanting to be different but lacking the financial resources to do it properly. The falling in and out of relationships, never knowing what it is they want, never finding the thing that is lacking.

The final essay draws the arc of Nazi ascension to its zenith. Throughout the book, the fascists are slowly creeping towards their annexation of show more the heart of Berlin society. The people whom Isherwood knows are mostly the people that the Nazis want to exterminate. The public brutality of the system increases suddenly and is assimilated by ordinary people who live in fear of being brutalised themselves. As Isherwood says, it is depressing. show less

Goodbye to Berlin is the product of a masterful writer, capable of beautiful, lyrical descriptions of settings and moods, and insightful into the character and personalities of the book’s characters.
While the book offers up a series of short stories, each offering capable of standing on its own, the whole forms as a sort of loosely constructed novel where characters developed in one story wander into others in the book, and many are brought together is the book’s last story.
Isherwood’s construction and sequencing of the stories is masterful as well. He begins with a story developing the setting and context, proceeds to the story of Sally Bowles wherein he focuses on the character of Sally, a beautiful, sad young woman who sleeps show more with men to earn money and whose innocence and guileless combines with her lack of intelligence to create an almost comical parody of a person.
Later in the book, this same ignorant woman has given herself entirely over to sex, sexuality and kinkiest and has become not immoral, but amoral.
In the background is the shouldering rise of the Nazi party which comes full grown in last of the stories.
Good writing make good books and this volume certainly rises to the occasion. show less

I enjoyed this book just as much as [b:Mr Norris Changes Trains|705163|Mr Norris Changes Trains|Christopher Isherwood|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1320426661s/705163.jpg|1473499]. It lacks the persistent sense of foreboding that characterises the earlier book, but it makes up for it by more clearly showing the poverty and social decay that existed in Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. The desperation of all the characters is clear as they cope with the consequences of long term social and economic collapse. The final couple of stories then emphasise the terrifying rise of the Nazis with remarkable acuity.

Isherwood creates a narrator who is engaged and expresses his own emotions, but refuses to judge or sensationalise show more what he sees. So when he states that he "shuddered in disgust" or similar, it is never quite clear that the disgust is justified, merely that this was his reaction. It is left to the reader to decide how to respond. Of course, the result is that all the emotions are felt much more keenly by the reader because they own them. Add to this the vividness of the descriptions and the expert characterisation and reading the book is a wonderful experience. show less

A really striking set of barely fictionalized memoir stories strung into a loose narrative. Very much evocative of their time and location, and more satisfying than the companion work, Mr. Norris Changes Trains. It's also less glib. It's no surprise this generated a play and a couple of films - there are several different strands of overlapping, vividly drawn characters, and we see clearly how their lives are affected and changed as Berlin itself changes under the rise of the Nazi party.

Solo un fine narratore può rendere per fermi immagini, acquerelli, note diaristiche apparentemente prive di pathos e distaccata ironia, prima il crescente disagio economico della popolazione (mirabile la scena dei cittadini davanti alla prima banca fallita, chiusa, in vana attesa con le borse di cuoio) e poi l'inarrestabile, orribile ascesa della violenza nazista. La vita al tempo della Repubblica di Weimar scorre perfino lieta, anche brillante tra café, locali notturni, gite sul Wannsee, i resti della Belle Époque che stenta a cedere il passo all'austerità da inflazione, ma Isherwood rende perfettamente la cappa di terrore impotente che, senz'altro, aleggiava allora su Berlino e la Germania tutta. Forse il più bel libro sulla vita show more a Berlino nei primi anni Trenta, quando la tragedia non si era manifestata del tutto, ma già mostrava le unghie di tigre assetata di sangue, di guerra, di rivalsa nazionalista. Eccelso pittore che tratteggia in modo scarno, perfetto, quasi giornalistico il terrore montante, l'accettazione passiva, la mancanza quasi generale di ribellione dei cittadini ariani e l'adattamento silenzioso alle nuove, mortifere leggi. Incipit ed excipit memorabili, realismo intrecciato a poesia in tutte le altre pagine. show less