Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 novel by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood set during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. The novel recounts Isherwood's 1929–1932 sojourn as a pleasure-seeking British expatriate on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany and consists of a "series of sketches of disintegrating Berlin, its slums and nightclubs and comfortable villas, its odd maladapted types and its complacent burghers."^[1] The plot was based on factual events in Isherwood's life, and the novel's characters were based upon actual persons.^[2] The insouciant flapper Sally Bowles was based on teenage cabaret singer Jean Ross who became Isherwood's friend during his sojourn.

During Isherwood's time abroad in Germany, the young author witnessed extreme "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the

The 1939 novel was republished together with Isherwood's 1935 novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains, in a 1945 collection titled The Berlin Stories. Critics praised the collection as capturing the bleak nihilism of the Weimar period.^[10] In 2010, Time magazine hailed the collection as one of the 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th century.^[10] Goodbye to Berlin was adapted into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera, the 1966 musical Cabaret, and the 1972 film of the same name. According to critics, the novel's character Sally Bowles inspired Truman Capote's character Holly Golightly in his 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.^[11][12]

Biographical context

Isherwood in 1939

The autobiographical novel recounts writer Christopher Isherwood's sojourn in Jazz Age Berlin and describes the pre-Nazi social milieu as well as the colourful personalities he encountered.^[2] At the time, a young Isherwood was wholly indifferent to the growing spectre of fascism,^[13] and he had moved to Berlin in order to avail himself of boy prostitutes and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.^[14][15]

While residing in the city, Isherwood socialised with a

Likewise, Stephen Spender described Ross' singing as underwhelming and forgettable: "In my mind's eye, I can see her now in some dingy bar standing on a platform and singing so inaudibly that I could not hear her from the back of the room where I was discreetly seated."[29]

Jean Ross, a cabaret singer in the Weimar Republic, inspired the character of Sally Bowles.

Although Isherwood occasionally had sex with women,^[30] Ross—unlike the fictional character Sally—never tried to seduce Isherwood,^[31] although they were forced to share a bed whenever their tiny flat became overcrowded with visiting revelers.^[16][32] Instead, a 27-year-old Isherwood settled into a same-sex relationship with a 16-year-old German boy named Heinz Neddermeyer,^[33][34] while Ross entered into a variety of heterosexual liaisons, including one with the blond musician Peter van Eyck, the future star of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear.^[35]

After her separation from van Eyck, Ross realised she was pregnant.^[36] As a favour to Ross, Isherwood facilitated an abortion procedure.^[37] Ross nearly died as a result of the botched abortion.^[27] Following her abortion, Isherwood visited Ross in the hospital. Wrongly assuming he was the father, the hospital staff despised him for impregnating Ross and then callously forcing her to have an abortion. These tragicomic events inspired Isherwood to write his 1937 novella Sally Bowles and serves as its narrative climax.^[38][39]

While Ross recovered from the abortion procedure, the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Germany.^[40] As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right,"^[3] Isherwood, Ross, Spender, and other British nationals soon realised that staying any longer in Germany would be perilous. ^[4] "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled.^[40] Isherwood commented to a friend: "Adolf, with his rectangular black moustache, has come to stay and brought all his friends.... Nazis are to be enrolled as 'auxiliary police,' which means that one must now not only be murdered but that it is illegal to offer any resistance."^[27]

Two weeks after the

Ross particularly resented how Isherwood depicted Sally Bowles expressing

Although Isherwood's stories about the Jazz Age nightlife of Weimar-era Berlin became commercially successful, Isherwood later denounced his writings.[57] He lamented that he had not understood the suffering of the people which he depicted.^[57] He stated that 1930s Berlin had been:

a real city in which human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and near-starvation. The 'wickedness' of Berlin's night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them.... As for the 'monsters', they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them to suit his childish fantasy.^[57]

Plot summary

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking...

— Christopher Isherwood, A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930^[58]

After relocating to Weimar-era Berlin to work on a novel, an English writer explores the decadent nightlife of the city and becomes enmeshed in the colourful lives of a diverse array of Berlin denizens. He acquires modest lodgings in a boarding house owned by Fräulein Schroeder, a caring landlady.

At the boarding house, he interacts with the other tenants, including the brazen prostitute Fräulein Kost, who has a Japanese patron, and the decadent Sally Bowles, a young English flapper who sings tunelessly in a seedy cabaret called "The Lady Windermere". Due to a mutual lack of funds, Christopher and Sally soon become roommates,^[f] and he learns a great deal about her sex life as well as her coterie of "marvelous" lovers.

When Sally becomes pregnant after a tryst, Christopher facilitates an abortion, and the painful incident draws them closer together.^[g] When he visits Sally at the hospital, the hospital staff assume he is Sally's impregnator and despise him for forcing her to have an abortion. Later during the summer, Christopher resides at a beach house near the Baltic Sea with Peter Wilkinson and Otto Nowak, a gay couple struggling with their sexual identities. Jealous of Otto's endless flirtations with other men, Peter departs for England, and Christopher returns to Berlin to live with Otto's family, the Nowaks.

During this time, Christopher meets teenage Natalie Landauer whose wealthy Jewish family owns a department store. After the Nazis smash the windows of several Jewish shops, Christopher learns that Natalie's cousin Bernhard is dead, likely murdered by the Nazis. Ultimately, Christopher is forced to leave Germany as the Nazis continue their ascent to power, and he fears that many of his beloved Berlin acquaintances are now dead.

Major characters

• Christopher Isherwood – an English writer who visits Berlin and becomes entangled in the lives of various locals. The character is based upon the author. Isherwood specifically relocated to poverty-stricken Berlin to avail himself of underage male prostitutes,^[62][63] and he was politically indifferent about the rise of fascism.^[63] Jean Ross later claimed that Sally Bowles' political indifference more closely resembled Isherwood himself and his hedonistic male friends,^[64] many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms".^[65] Ross' opinion of Isherwood's political indifference was confirmed by Isherwood's acquaintance W. H. Auden who noted the young Isherwood "held no [political] opinions whatever about anything".^[13]
• Sally Bowles – a British cabaret singer with whom Christopher briefly shares a small Nollendorfstrasse flat. She has a number of sexual liaisons, becomes pregnant, and undergoes an abortion.^[66] The character was based upon 19-year-old Jean Ross.^[66] Like Ross, Sally attended the exclusive Leatherhead School in Surrey, England,^[67] and she hailed from a wealthy family.^[68] According to Isherwood, Sally should not be either viewed or interpreted as "a tart."^[69] Instead, Sally "is a little girl who has listened to what the grown-ups had said about tarts, and who was trying to copy those things".^[69]
• Fräulein Schroeder – a plump German landlady who owns the boarding house where Christopher and Sally reside. The character was based upon Fräulein Meta Thurau.^[70] According to Isherwood, Thurau "was tremendously intrigued by [Jean Ross'] looks and mannerisms, her makeup, her style of dressing, and above all, her stories about her love affairs. But she didn't altogether like Jean. For Jean was untidy and inconsiderate; she made a lot of extra work for her landladies. She expected room service and sometimes would order people around in an imperious tone, with her English upper-class rudeness".^[60]

• Otto Nowak – a handsome,
  bisexual teenager Walter Wolff who had been born in eastern Germany prior to its transfer to Poland after the Treaty of Versailles.^[72] Unwilling to become Polish citizens, Walter and his family moved to the Berlin slums after World War I.^[73] Although irrepressibly merry, Wolff was described by Isherwood as an incorrigible narcissist who cared little about the feelings of the men and women who pursued him.^[74]
• Peter Wilkinson – an English expatriate who sexually pursues Otto Nowak and then departs Germany due to Otto's flirtations with other men. The character was partly based on William Robson-Scott, a lecturer in English at
  Berlin University.^[75] Robson-Scott "was at this time homosexual and, according to Isherwood, occasionally paid boys to beat him."^[75] As three family members had died before he turned 15-years-old, Robson-Scott was "deeply apprehensive about life, believing that if one loved somebody the natural consequence of this would be their death."^[75]
• Natalie Landauer – an earnest young Jewish woman whose affluent family pays Christopher for English lessons. Natalie's cousin Bernhard is later murdered, presumably by Nazi street thugs. The character was loosely based upon Gisa Soleweitschick.[76]^[77] According to Soleweitschick, her mother had discerned quickly that Isherwood was "not interested in girls" and, accordingly, she trusted him as her daughter's unchaperoned companion.^[76] However, Gisa herself did not realise that Isherwood was gay, and she attributed his lack of sexual advances to his "fine English manners."^[76]
• Klaus Linke – an itinerant musician who impregnates Sally and is based upon Peter van Eyck.^[66] Although some biographers identify van Eyck as Jewish,^[h][80] others posit van Eyck was the wealthy scion of Prussian landowners in Pomerania.^[81] As an aristocrat, he was expected by his family to embark upon a military career but he became interested in jazz as a young man and pursued musical studies in Berlin.^[79]
• Clive – a wealthy playboy based upon American expatriate John Blomshield who inspired the enigmatic character of Baron Maximilian von Heune in the 1972 film adaptation.^[82][83] According to contradictory sources, Blomshield sexually pursued both Isherwood and Ross for a short while in Berlin, and he invited them to accompany him on a trip abroad to the United States. When they had agreed to go, he then abruptly disappeared without saying goodbye.^[84][85] Blomshield bluntly terminated his relationships in the same manner that Clive ends his affair with Sally.^[86]

Critical reception

Goodbye to Berlin received positive reviews by newspaper critics and contemporary writers.^[7] Critics praised Isherwood's "flair for sheer story-telling" and his ability to spin "an engrossing tale without bothering you with a plot."^[1] In a review for The Observer, novelist L. P. Hartley wrote that Isherwood "is an artist to his finger-tips. If he were not, these sketches of pre-Hitlerian Berlin (the Nazi regime is coming into force when the book closes) would make still sadder reading, for all around is poverty, suspicion, and the threat of violence."^[87] Hartley concluded by noting that "if his glimpses are oblique and partial, they are also revealing: Goodbye to Berlin is a historical as well as a personal record."^[87]

Critic Anne Margaret Angus praised Isherwood's mastery in conveying the ingravescent despair of Berlin's denizens, "with their febrile emotionalism" and "their hopeless clinging to the pleasures of the moment".

Contemporary writer and literary critic George Orwell likewise praised the novel.^[9] Although Orwell believed the work to be inferior to Isherwood's earlier novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains, he nonetheless believed that Goodbye to Berlin contained "brilliant sketches of a society in decay".^[9] In particular, Orwell singled out for praise the chapter titled "The Nowaks" which concerns a working-class Berlin family on the verge of destitution and disaster.^[9] "Reading such tales as this," Orwell observed, "the thing that surprises one is not that Hitler came to power, but that he did not do so several years earlier. The book ends with the triumph of the Nazis and Mr. Isherwood's departure from Berlin."^[9]

In her book Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction, author Mia Spiro remarks that "despite that which they could not know, the novels that Barnes, Isherwood, and Woolf wrote do reveal the historical, cultural, political, and social conditions in 1930s Europe that made the continent ripe for disaster".^[88]

Adaptations

Julie Harris as the insouciant Sally Bowles

The novel was adapted by

Tony Awards for Best Leading Actress, although it earned the infamous review by Walter Kerr, "Me no Leica."^[89] The play's title is a quote taken from the novel's first page ("I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.").^[58] The play was then adapted into a commercially successful film, also called I Am a Camera (1955), featuring Laurence Harvey, Shelley Winters and Julie Harris, with screenplay by John Collier and music by Malcolm Arnold

.

The book was next adapted into the

bed-wetting."^[60]

Isherwood's friends, especially the poet

W.H. Auden and others asserted that both the 1972 film and 1966 Broadway musical deleteriously glamorised the harsh realities of the 1930s Weimar era.^[90][91]

Influence

According to literary critics, the character of Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin inspired Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in his later novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.^[11][12] Critics have alleged that both scenes and dialogue in Capote's 1958 novella have direct equivalencies in Isherwood's earlier 1937 work.^[12] Capote had befriended Isherwood in New York in the late 1940s, and Capote was an admirer of Isherwood's novels.^[92]

References

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Many Berlin cabarets located along the Kurfürstendamm avenue, an entertainment-vice district, had been marked for future destruction by Joseph Goebbels as early as 1928.^[42]
2. ^ Paul Bowles was an American writer who wrote the novel The Sheltering Sky.^[16] Isherwood appropriated his surname for the character of Sally Bowles.^[17][18]
3. ^ Peter Parker notes that Ross "claimed that Isherwood 'grossly underrated' her singing abilities, but her family agreed that this was one aspect of Sally Bowles that Isherwood got absolutely right".^[27]
4. Peter Porcupine.^[48]
5. ^ In an article for The New York Review of Books, writer Gore Vidal notes Isherwood's inordinate preoccupation with racial matters.^[55] In contrast to Isherwood, Ross was noted in her later years for her commitment to racial equality.^[52]
6. ^ Relations between Isherwood and Ross were not always amicable, and they often quarrelled.^[60] Stephen Spender claimed relations between Isherwood and Ross were often acrimonious, and Isherwood referred to Ross as "a bitch" for snidely claiming he might one day "write something really great, like Noël Coward".^[61]
7. ^ Isherwood wrote in 1976 that, "in real life, Jean and Christopher had a relationship which was asexual but more truly intimate than the relationships between Sally and her various partners in the novel, the plays and the films".^[60]
8. Jewish.^[78] Others contend van Eyck was a Pomeranian aristocrat.^[79] The character of Klaus Linke in Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin is based upon van Eyck.^[27]

Citations

1. ^ ^{a b} Daily Herald 1939, p. 8.
2. ^ ^{a b} Doyle 2013.
3. ^ ^{a b} Spender 1977.
4. ^ ^{a b} Spender 1966, p. 129; Parker 2005, p. 254.
5. ^ Parker 2005, p. 221.
6. ^ ^{a b c} Isherwood 1976, pp. 164–166; Farina 2013, p. 74–81.
7. ^ ^{a b} Hartley 1939, p. 7; Angus 1939, p. 52; Orwell 1998, p. 237.
8. ^ ^{a b c d e} Angus 1939, p. 52.
9. ^ ^{a b c d e f} Orwell 1998, p. 237.
10. ^ ^{a b} Grossman 2010.
11. ^ ^{a b} Izzo 2005, p. 144: "Truman Capote's Holly Golightly... the latter of whom is a tribute to Isherwood and his Sally Bowles..."
12. ^ ^{a b c} Norton 2010.
13. ^ ^{a b} Allen 2004.
14. ^ Moss 1979: Isherwood frequented "the boy-bars in Berlin in the late years of the Weimar Republic.... [He] discovered a world utterly different from the repressive English one he disliked, and with it, the excitements of sex and new subject matter."
15. ^ Isherwood 1976, Chapter 1: "To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys... Christopher was suffering from an inhibition, then not unusual among upper-class homosexuals; he couldn't relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation. He needed a working-class foreigner. He had become clearly aware of this when he went to Germany in May 1928."
16. ^ ^{a b} Garebian 2011, pp. 6–7.
17. ^ Bowles 1985, p. 110: In his autobiography Without Stopping, the author Paul Bowles surmised that Isherwood, whom he met in Berlin, borrowed his surname for the character Sally Bowles.
18. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144: "Isherwood himself admitted that he named the character of [Sally Bowles] for Paul Bowles, whose 'looks' he liked."
19. ^ Garebian 2011, pp. 6–7; Spender 1977; Spender 1966, pp. 125–130.
20. ^ Garebian 2011, p. 30: "Sally seems satisfied to be divinely decadent..."
21. ^ Mizejewski 1992, p. 4: "The Sally character herself is this century's darling of divine decadence, an odd measure of how dear to us is this fiction of the 'shocking' British/American vamp in Weimar Berlin."
22. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 63: "Jean moved into a room in the Nollendorfstrasse flat after she met Christopher, early in 1931".
23. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144; Isherwood Obituary.
24. ^ Parker 2004; Parker 2005.
25. ^ Lehmann 1987, p. 18: "Jean Ross, whom [Isherwood] had met in Berlin as one of his fellow-lodgers in the Nollendorfstrasse for a time, when she was earning her living as a (not very remarkable) singer in a second-rate cabaret."
26. ^ Lehmann 1987, p. 18.
27. ^ ^{a b c d} Parker 2005, p. 220.
28. ^ Isherwood 1963, p. 25, Goodbye to Berlin.
29. ^ Spender 1993, p. 74.
30. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 10–11.
31. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 63: "Jean never tried to seduce him [Isherwood]. But I remember a rainy, depressing afternoon when she remarked, 'What a pity we can't make love, there's nothing else to do,' and he agreed that it was and there wasn't".
32. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 63: "On at least one occasion, because of some financial or housing emergency, they [Isherwood and Ross] shared a bed without the least embarrassment. Jean knew Otto and Christopher's other sex mates but showed no desire to share them, although he wouldn't have really minded".
33. ^ Parker 2004, pp. 205–206: "...a sixteen-year-old Berliner named Heinz Neddermeyer... Isherwood realized that he 'had found someone emotionally innocent, entirely vulnerable and uncritical, whom he could protect and cherish as his very own.' In other words, he had found the person for whom he had been looking in all his relationships with adolescents."
34. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 6; Vidal 1976.
35. ^ Frost 2013; Gallagher 2014; Thomson 2005; Parker 2005, p. 220.
36. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 244–245; Gallagher 2014; Thomson 2005.
37. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 244–245; Spender 1966, p. 127; Spender 1974, pp. 138–139.
38. ^ Lehmann 1987, pp. 28–9; Gallagher 2014.
39. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144: "The abortion is a turning point in the narrator's relationship with Sally and also in his relationship to Berlin and to his writing".
40. ^ ^{a b} Spender 1966, p. 129.
41. ^ Parker 2005, p. 221: "Isherwood recognized that he could not remain in Berlin much longer and on April 5, the day measures were brought in to ban Jews from the teaching professions and the Civil Service, he arrived back in London, bringing with him many of his possessions."
42. ^ Farina 2013, p. 79.
43. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 150: "Erwin [Hansen] returned to Germany several years later. Someone told me that he was arrested by the Nazis and died in a concentration camp."
44. ^ Parker 2005, p. 614: "It was probably during the Berlin trip that Isherwood learned that the Nazis eventually caught up with his other companion on his 1933 journey to Greece, Erwin Hansen, who had died in a concentration camp."
45. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 297: "Heinz [Neddermeyer] might easily have been sentenced to an indefinite term in a concentration camp, as many homosexuals were...Like the Jews, homosexuals were often put into 'liquidation' units, in which they were given less food and more work than other prisoners. Thus, thousands of them died."
46. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 100–101; Croft 1989, p. 156; Firchow 2008, p. 120.
47. ^ Williams 1996, p. 265; Fyrth 1999; Whaley 1969, p. 44.
48. ^ Hogenkamp 1986, p. 119.
49. ^ Hutchings 2008, p. 122.
50. ^ Forbes 2011, pp. 206–19.
51. ^ Croft 1989, p. 156; Firchow 2008, p. 120.
52. ^ ^{a b c d e} Caudwell 1986, pp. 28–29.
53. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144: "Sally's attractiveness is also diminished by two anti-Semitic remarks she makes, which are omitted in all the postwar adaptations".
54. ^ Isherwood 1998, p. 45: "This job at the Lady Windermere only lasts another week. I got it through a man I met at the Eden Bar. But he's gone off to Vienna now. I must ring up the Ufa people again, I suppose. And then there's an awful old Jew who takes me out sometimes. He's always promising to get me a contract; but he only wants to sleep with me, the old swine."
55. ^ Vidal 1976.
56. ^ ^{a b} Hensher 2005.
57. ^ ^{a b c} Fryer 1977, pp. 146–47.
58. ^ ^{a b} Isherwood 1998, p. 9.
59. ^ Isherwood 1963, p. 177, Goodbye to Berlin.
60. ^ ^{a b c d e} Isherwood 1976, p. 63.
61. ^ Spender 1966, p. 122.
62. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 2: "It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys. At school, Christopher had fallen in love with many boys and had been yearningly romantic about them. At college he had at last managed to get into bed with one."
63. ^ ^{a b} Moss 1979.
64. ^ Firchow 2008, p. 120; Caudwell 1986.
65. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 124–125; Doyle 2013.
66. ^ ^{a b c} Parker 2005, p. 192.
67. ^ Parker 2005, p. 206.
68. ^ Parker 2004.
69. ^ ^{a b} Van Druten 1983, p. 6.
70. ^ Parker 2005, p. 175.
71. ^ Isherwood 1963, pp. 206–207, Goodbye to Berlin.
72. ^ Parker 2005, p. 167: "He was principally heterosexual, but he enjoyed sex wherever he found it and was easily aroused by Isherwood's physical infatuation with him."
73. ^ Parker 2005, p. 167.
74. ^ Parker 2005, pp. 167–168.
75. ^ ^{a b c} Parker 2005, p. 208.
76. ^ ^{a b c} Parker 2005, p. 186.
77. ^ Parker 2005, p. 218: As the Nazis seized power, Gisa Soleweitschick "left Berlin to continue her studies in Paris".
78. ^ Parker 2005, p. 220; Thomson 2005.
79. ^ ^{a b} Bergfelder 2007, p. 47; Bock & Bergfelder 2009, pp. 495–496.
80. ^ Thomson 2005; Parker 2005, p. 220.
81. ^ Bergfelder 2007, p. 47.
82. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 30; Fryer 1993; MacLean 2014.
83. ^ Parker 2005, pp. 191–192: "Although married, Blomshield was entirely homosexual and had the sort of unlimited funds that enabled him to enjoy the city in a way Isherwood never could. He was also generous, and decided that Isherwood, Spender and Jean Ross should be given a taste of the high life. 'He altered our lives for about a week,' Spender recalled—a week Isherwood re-created in Goodbye to Berlin, where Blomshield inspired the character of Clive, the rich young man who takes up, treats and then unceremoniously dumps Chris and Sally."
84. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 84: "... the American thrilled them by inviting them to come with him to the States and then dashed their hopes by leaving Berlin abruptly, without saying goodbye."
85. ^ Parker 2005, pp. 191–192; Fryer 1993; MacLean 2014.
86. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 30.
87. ^ ^{a b} Hartley 1939, p. 7.
88. ^ Spiro 2012, p. 244.
89. ^ Botto 2008.
90. ^ ^{a b} Spender 1977, p. 198.
91. ^ Johnstone 1975, pp. 33–34.
92. ^ Clarke 1988, Chapter 19.

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