The Berlin Stories

Having enjoyed the film Cabaret since it came out in 1972, I have wanted to read Isherwood’s novels for a long time. Of course, the novels are not the movie. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see Isherwood’s depiction of the social and political context of Berlin in the early 1930s from his very personal, up-close perspective.
Although not strictly autobiographical, the stories draw closely from Isherwood’s life and contacts. And it’s hard to imagine that he could, or would want to, create the detail in the stories without having seen them in person. His descriptions are often sketchy, but nevertheless give enough detail to leave a vivid picture of the milieu and the characters. He takes the stance of an outside observer – show more “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking,” he famously says in the first page of Farewell to Berlin. He reports what he sees in a non-judgemental tone, while clearly sympathizing with the left-wing (communist) anti-Nazi characters.
Perhaps it was a fear of censorship or social intolerance, but it’s a little disappointing that he chose to underplay the queer scene of Berlin almost entirely. (I think there’s one point where the character Christopher responds Yes when asked if he is queer.) Many of the characters can be read as queer, and there is a degree of homoerotic attraction in their relationships. But actual queer sexuality was certainly a part of the scene that Christopher inhabits, and it seems artificial to have left it out. Isherwood’s later book, Christopher and His Kind, apparently deals with this, and perhaps anything more explicit would have been unpublishable in England in the 1930s.
The most vivid of several memorable characters is Sally Bowles. (I can see why the film producers wanted to focus on her.) It’s not clear why Sally and Christopher form such a strong relationship. Sally is irreverent, unconventional and fun, which brings a lot of energy and laughter to the otherwise staid Christopher. She perhaps appreciates his stability and the fact that he seems to adore her and she can manipulate him. Many of the other characters are memorable in their own ways – a bit like the caricatures that stand out in Dickens’ novels. The mysterious Norris convincingly plays every side for his own advantage, but seems to be constantly on the run. The working-class Otto seems to be in a sado-masochistic relationship with Christopher’s friend, and then welcomes Christopher into the two-room apartment he shares with his impoverished family, and introduces Christopher to his communist friends and his Nazi brother. Most poignant is the wealthy Jewish esthete Bernard, with whom Christopher has a very personal and close relationship, although apparently not an erotic one. Although somewhat exaggerated, these characters all come across as actual people.
The stories seem a bit random and unconnected, but they all fit into the background of the growing Nazi influence in Germany in the early 1930s. At the beginning of the stories, the Nazis seem a vague but ridiculous threat. As the stories continue, they are elected to government and acquire more power by intimidating people on the street and managing a semi-legal coup. In the final segments, they are a dominating malevolent force that imprisons some of Christopher’s friends and is responsible for the death of at least one of them.
The overriding narrative describes how people in various parts of a complex social situation respond to growing Nazi-ism, and also how the society fails to deal with the clear threat. People know what is happening. The fact that Isherwood’s books were published in 1935 describing the violence and arbitrary power grab also makes it clear that Isherwood’s contemporaries knew it, too. The inflation and unemployment of Germany in the 1930s may have convinced people that anything would be better than the status quo, and that the whole system needed to be overthrown.
That gives the stories relevance today – we may also be in a time when alienation and disillusionment are taking us to the same catastrophic path. show less

With apologies to the similarly time encapsulating THE SOUND OF MUSIC: How do you solve a problem like Christopher Isherwood? In his rather lengthy introduction to THE BERLIN STORIES, Isherwood admits to having difficulty deciding how to present his myriad recollections of pre-WWII Germany. Initially, he thought one long novel but he struggled to find threads strong enough to hold so many characters and paths together in one story line, so he eventually he broke them down into smaller projects such as the two novellas collected here--allowing his memories to coalesce into clumps largely held together by time and place and little else. Today such a project might more likely be allowed the fluid form of memoir as opposed to being forced show more into the ill-fitting structure of the novel. How much fun and more natural for the author this would have been is hinted at by his enjoyable introduction. A memoir with literary flourishes would have worked better than several memoir-ish novellas. So all that being said, you may wonder why I gave this ****. Ultimately I have surprised myself. Considering that virtually nothing happens over the course of the two novellas, and at times I found myself clambering for any foothold to hold my interest, a strange thing happened. I became lost amid the squalid tenements, beach resort hotels, and the crowded and just barely kempt boarding houses of Isherwood’s Berlin and became friends with the poor and rich alike and everyone in between striving or falling while walking the streets, drinking in dives or going to parties, bordellos and burlesque joints. THE BERLIN STORIES were like moving into a new neighborhood, the lines between familiar and unfamiliar blur and then vanish until it is like you have always been there and can never imagine forgetting what you have seen. The image of each person is so vividly crafted that many of them remain projected in my mind long after their moments upon the page and I was left wondering what happened next in the life of everyone who passed through the stories. At first it bothered me that so many lives dropped from the authors hands without seeming to go anywhere but I came to accept that as part of the point. While the Nazi’s are barely referenced, it is understood that they are always lurking—an inescapable tragedy that will toss millions of lives into the air let alone the relatively few presented here. Few realize that their lives really aren’t going anywhere despite the mad dash of the every day. As each character fell away from the narrative, I could not help but imagine them kind of freezing in place and awaiting the massive wave of WWII much like the main character of Francois Truffaut’s 400 BLOWS who finally manages to run away to the beach only to find he doesn’t know what to do next. As all these lives mount over the course of the two novellas, the power of expectation increases. What will become of all those characters left standing on the shore waiting for that wave to come for them? show less

This is a review for both ‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ and ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ by Christopher Isherwood, two separate but connected books collected in this edition into one volume.

Berlin, before and then during The Fall. There are Nazis on the streets, streets also being stalked by fear and paranoia. Given that there are actual Nazis on the streets, the fear and the paranoia are real, and terribly justified.
Christopher Isherwood recounts both the wider swirling political chaos of the time, a terror that is ensnaring a city, a madness that is engulfing a people, a tyranny that is enslaving a country, but also a deeply personal tale of what it is to be an outsider, both in the sense of being an increasingly unwelcome foreigner in an show more increasingly zealously racist nation and, oh yes, of being a spy. In this case it is the worst of all possible spies, a spy who acts not from any nationalism of belief, but purely in self interest, ironically losing his identity, his sense of self, in the process.
William Bradshaw, clearly and not so subtly Isherwood’s alter ego, meets Mr Norris, appropriately for a Bradshaw, on a train. The two strike up an unlikely friendship, for Norris is clearly as suspicious a character who ever sported a dodgy syrup, and before long Bradshaw is embroiled in Norris’s life.
The place and era are described so perfectly that it gives the reader chills and sweats simultaneously. Berlin is a city on the very edge of both tremendous change, and the abyss, as the fascists roam the streets in gangs, handing out beatings with the cheery air of thugs who know that they are more likely to be commended than condemned for their actions. It is quite clear that life as Berliners know it is coming to an end. For some, this is a time of celebration, and certainly the Nazis are famed for their torchlight parades, for others, a time of desperation. Germans are witnessing their country’s morality being stolen, piece by piece.
Opposing this national abrogation of decency are various factions, such as the communists, who in the manner of well meaning but slightly sinister political groups everywhere appear to skulk in the upstairs rooms of buildings drafting political statements. It’s either that or form a theatre troupe.
What was obviously needed was a crack squad of trenchermen to occupy the beerkellers, denying the Nazi his natural habitat, down a few dozen lagers and then beat the living crap out of anyone in a brown shirt.
Instead, anyone left leaning opposing the Nazis takes the more traditional option of dividing themselves into different groups and fighting one another, all the while devoting no less than one third of their energy to doomed romances, especially if doing so annoys the leader of a rival group or, better yet, members of your own group.
Isherwood clearly has affection for the city he is writing about and even, oddly, for the era. There is, possibly, just possibly, something about a state of near panic sustained for days and weeks while a city lurches from one crisis to another, the sense of real life suspended, that appeals to a certain character. That character is somebody with a foreign passport and no real ties to the city in question, who can get the hell out of town when things get a little too real. Ever since Empire, Brits have always ventured abroad with the attitude that ‘nothing bad can happen to me, I’m British and a tourist’. This is the ‘just passing through’ attitude taken to its illogical conclusion.
Mr Norris may have a passport as dodgy as his syrup, but his ties to Berlin are much stronger.
There is probably no good time, or bad time, to be involved in espionage. To spy requires one to pretend to be something that one is not, and this is not for everyone. Spying, we are given to understand, is not like am-dram. It is, more than anything else, moral compromise and requires sacrifice of the self. If one believes in a cause or a country, then one may consider the sacrifice worthwhile.
‘Mr Norris Changes Trains’ is a compelling novel of a collective move to madness by a people, characterised by a city being overrun by barbarians, and an individual move to desperation by the titular character.
When does society begin to decay?
Not decline, because decline can possibly suggest something far more gentle, far less sinister. Decline can suggest the image of a ruined nuclear power station, now overgrown with lush foliage, reclaimed by nature, on the horizion while in the foreground a water-mill grinds corn for a society that is once again, and quite happily, pre-industrial. Decline can be a civilization that is at its pinnacle, one step away from faster than light space travel, or global annihilation and frankly does not like those odds and so decides ‘sod it, that’s it for advancement, time to take things easy and leave it for future generations to puzzle and marvel at our vast superstructures, ruined skyscrapers, and mistakenly think that we had so very many coffee shops because we indulged in a primitive form of bean worship’.
Decay is different. Decay is rotten. Decay is dangerous.
Maybe a civilization, a society, decays when it is over-ripe, decadent.
A society that is overtly decadent can be mistaken for a society that is weak, and where there is weakness in society there is always some idiot that fancies himself the strong man who will show people how things should be done. Where there are people who are enjoying themselves, there are always those who consider that they are enjoying themselves in the wrong way, or too much, or more than the resentful killjoys who just don’t like a bit of subversive fun.
In ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, Christopher Isherwood records both decline and decay.
The decline is of normality. The book is a collection of stories that are scenes of life in Berlin in the 1930s. Inevitably, the Nazis spoil the fun.
There is a slow creep of horror here. The reader knows what’s going to happen, knows what happened to that city, that country, at that time, an age which has been described as a collective madness gripping a nation is shown here with some embracing that madness rather than being gripped by it, with terrible consequences for ordinary Berliners, and particularly dire consequences for any resident of that city slightly out of the ordinary which at that time meant, basically, ‘not a Nazi’.
So there is the decline of morality and society and civilization, because of the very decay that the Nazis represent. They are the rot, putting an end to what some might perceive as decadent, but what others might consider liberated, and liberating.
This is an immensely thought provoking, and somewhat disturbing, book. It records a dark chapter in the history of humanity and the contrast between the vivacious characters, even if they are slightly desperate, and the dark forces that are encircling them could not be greater. Moreover it shows just how easily, just how incrementally, the unthinkable can happen, how by labelling something as decedent, as other, as unnatural, the persecution of those groups can be justified by those who think they are in the right.
That is not to say that the lives that the characters in the stories lead are blameless, or perfect. They are flawed in their own ways, and all too human in their own ways. Their society is not perfect, far from it, but it does not deserve to be ended with such brutality, such stealthy brutality, an invasion from within, goosestep by goosestep slowly eroding freedoms, rights, then expectations and even hopes.
Those that are just that little bit different, that little bit exotic, that little bit, or even quit a lot, interesting can, when society is becoming twisted, be not different but dangerous, not exotic but threatening, not interesting but other and so become marginalised and alienated when it is not they that are the alien or to be feared, but their society that in decay has become alien.
This, then, is a record of a society that never got the chance to decline, as the decay set in first. Not a perfect society by any means, there is fun, sometimes a bit desperate, not always harmless, but by no means as harmful as that which threatens to end the way of life of the characters, slowly squeezing the fun, and difference, and decency, from Berlin. show less

I'm a huge fan of these novels, particularly Goodbye to Berlin. I love the way Isherwood puts the great changes in early 30s Germany in the background - as characters preoccupied with their own lives travel towards a new reality they are atonished to find themselves in when it arrives. This, I suspect, is how it happens. They are also wonderfully written and engaging from beginning to end.

I'm very glad to have read this, and am glad to have read it all the way through. The people, the voices accumulate in such a way that the whole is, as they say, somehow more than the sum of its parts. Had I just read the Sally Bowles sections (I mostly wanted to see where _Cabaret_ came from), I think I would have dismissed it as too light & frivolous—didn't he •see• what was happening? But of course he did see, and the horror and nausea of the lived experience is there. It just grows inevitably.

I think I will be reading more Isherwood.

The problem with most of these stories is that Isherwood casts himself as a complete outsider, so that his main character stands awkwardly on the verge of being an active participant in the action but almost always ends up a passive observer. When the main character speaks of good friends like Otto or Arthur, I never get a sense that those relationships are really as strong as the character says, and the interactions that the reader does glimpse really don't portray these friendships in the most believable light. A symptom of this deficiency is the main character's sexuality -- or lack of one. It seems that beyond concealing Bradshaw's/Isherwood's personality, Isherwood buries any sexual/romantic feelings he may have, too. Or perhaps show more that's where the root of the problem begins?

But the character's exacting, saucy narration and observations were still fun to read. Isherwood's description of people and places, though simple in style, conveyed a sense of reality that's hard to shake off, and with sarcasm to boot. His characterization of particular people especially -- like Sally Bowles, whom I loved, though I'm biased as a Cabaret fan -- riveted. On the other hand, I really disliked the Otto and Peter parts, which I slogged through, and thought represented Isherwood at his weakest. Were they shameful gay lovers, perhaps? I couldn't tell.

At his strongest, Isherwood reveals a world especially fraught with identity conflicts. That he picked one of the most interesting turning points in history at its epicenter -- the late Weimar Republic as it began to transition into the Nazi dictatorship, with the enfeebled German population compelled to choose between Nazism, communism and, to a much smaller degree, democracy -- only emboldened his sense of setting and character. Perhaps his ability to set his characters in this historical milieu is where he shines most. show less

Four stars for The Last of Mr. Norris, five stars for Goodbye to Berlin. The writing in both is beautiful, but GtB is more immediate and real, despite some of the liberties Isherwood took with some of the “characters,” like Sally Bowles. As a longtime fan of the film Cabaret, it was interesting to see the similarities and vast differences between the Fosse movie and its original source material. The character of Sally Bowles (and the author himself) are pretty spot on, except the Sally in the book is a terrible singer and dancer. Isherwood actually stayed in Berlin for a few years, long enough to see Hitler come to power and witness firsthand some of the Nazi atrocities. More than anything, reading Isherwood’s vivid and harrowing show more description of a nation descending into fascism is sobering and more than a little ominous at this particular moment in time. show less