Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye to Berlin

First edition cover
Author	Christopher Isherwood
Country	United Kingdom
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Hogarth Press
Publication date	1939
Pages	317
OCLC	5437385
Preceded by	Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935)

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 in poverty-stricken Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. Much of the novel's plot recounts actual events in Isherwood's life, and most of the novel's characters were based upon actual persons. The insouciant character of Sally Bowles was based on teenage cabaret singer Jean Ross who became Isherwood's intimate friend during his sojourn and, after an unplanned pregnancy, had a near-fatal abortion which the author facilitated.

The 1939 novel was later republished together with Isherwood's 1935 novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains, in a 1945 collection entitled The Berlin Stories. The work was praised by literary critics as deftly capturing the bleak nihilism of the Weimar period. In 2010, the collection was chosen as one of the Time 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th century. It was adapted into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and, later, the 1966 Cabaret musical and the 1972 film.

Historical context

Further information: Christopher Isherwood, Jean Ross, and Stephen Spender

Isherwood in 1939

The autobiographical novel recounts Christopher Isherwood's extended residence in Jazz Age Berlin and describes the pre-Nazi social milieu as well as the colourful persons he encountered. While sojourning in the city, Isherwood socialized with a blithe coterie of expatriate writers that included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Edward Upward, and Paul Bowles. As a gay man, Isherwood frequently interacted with enclaves of Berliners and foreigners who later would be at greatest risk from Nazi persecution, and various Berlin denizens befriended by Isherwood would later flee abroad or die in labour camps.

The novel's most memorable character—the irrepressibly merry Sally Bowles—was based upon 19-year-old Jean Ross with whom Isherwood briefly shared lodgings at Nollendorfstraße 17 in Schöneberg. Much like the character in the novel, Ross was a sexually liberated woman and a bohemian chanteuse in lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets. Isherwood visited these nightclubs to hear Ross sing, and he later described her singing talent as mediocre: "She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her." Likewise, mutual acquaintance Stephen Spender recalled that Ross' singing ability was quite 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."

Although Isherwood sometimes had sex with women, Ross—unlike the fictional character Sally—never tried to seduce Isherwood, although they were forced to share a bed whenever their flat became overcrowded with visiting revelers. Instead, Isherwood settled into a same-sex relationship with a young, working-class, German man named Heinz Neddermeyer, while Ross entered into a variety of heterosexual liaisons, including one with the tall, blond, musician Peter van Eyck, the future star of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear. Soon after their separation, Ross realised she was pregnant. As a personal favour to Ross, Isherwood pretended to be her heterosexual impregnator to facilitate an abortion procedure. Ross nearly died as a result of the abortion procedure. Isherwood visited Ross in the hospital following her abortion. Wrongly assuming he was the father, the hospital staff belittled him for impregnating Ross and then callously forcing her to have an abortion. These tragicomic events inspired Isherwood to write his 1937 short story "Sally Bowles" and serves as its narrative climax.

While Ross recovered from the abortion procedure, the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Germany. As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right," Isherwood, Spender, and other British nationals soon realized that they must leave the country. "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled. By the time the Nazi Party attained a plurality in the July 1932 elections, Isherwood had departed Germany and returned to England. Afterwards, most of Berlin's seedy cabarets were shuttered by the Nazis, and many of Isherwood's cabaret friends would later flee abroad or perish in concentration camps. These factual events served as the genesis for Isherwood's Berlin tales.

Following her departure from Germany, Ross became a devout Stalinist and a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. She served as an intrepid war correspondent for the Daily Express during the subsequent Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and is alleged to have been a propagandist for Joseph Stalin's Comintern. A skilled writer, Ross also worked as a film critic for the Daily Worker, and her criticisms of early Soviet cinema were later described as ingenious works of "dialectical sophistry". She often wrote political criticism, anti-fascist polemics, and manifestos. For the remainder of her life, Ross believed the public association of herself with the naïve and apolitical character of Sally Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist.

Although Isherwood's stories about the Jazz Age nightlife of Weimar Berlin became commercially successful, Isherwood later publicly denounced his writings. In a 1956 essay, Isherwood lamented that he had not understood the suffering of the people which he depicted. 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."

In his 1976 memoir based on this period of his life, Isherwood wrote that: "He liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives and die in unknown graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots."

Plot summary

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

— Christopher Isherwood, A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930

After permanently relocating to Berlin in order to work on his novel, an English writer named Bradshaw explores the decadent nightlife of the city and becomes enmeshed in the colorful lives of a diverse array of Berlin denizens. He acquires lodgings in a boarding house owned by Fräulein Schroeder, a caring landlady. At the boarding house, he interacts the other tenants including the frank prostitute Fräulein Kost who has a Japanese lover and the divinely decadent Sally Bowles, a young Englishwoman who sings in a seedy cabaret. Bradshaw and Bowles soon become roommates, and he learns a great deal about her sex life as well as her coterie of "marvelous" lovers.

When Sally becomes pregnant after a brief fling, Bradshaw facilitates an abortion, and the painful incident draws them closer together. 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, Bradshaw resides at a beach house near the Baltic Sea with Peter and Otto, a gay couple who are struggling with their sexual identities. Jealous of Otto's endless flirtations with other men, Peter departs for England, and Bradshaw returns to Berlin to live with Otto's family, the Nowaks. During this time, Bradshaw meets teenage Natalie Landauer whose Jewish family owns a department store. After the Nazis smash the windows of several Jewish shops, Bradshaw learns that Natalie's cousin Bernhard is dead, likely murdered by the Nazis. Ultimately, Bradshaw 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.

Reception

The novel was praised by contemporary writer George Orwell as "brilliant sketches of a society in decay". In her book Anti-Nazi Modernism, 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".

Adaptations

Further information: I Am a Camera, I Am a Camera (film), Cabaret (musical), and Cabaret (1972 film)

Julie Harris as the insouciant Sally Bowles

The novel was adapted by John Van Druten into a 1951 Broadway play called I Am a Camera. The play was a personal success for Julie Harris as the insouciant Sally Bowles, winning her the first of her five Tony Awards for Best Leading Actress, although it earned the infamous review by Walter Kerr, "Me no Leica." 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."). 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 Tony Award-winning musical Cabaret (1966) and the film Cabaret (1972) for which Liza Minnelli won an Academy Award for playing Sally. Isherwood was highly critical of the 1972 film due to what he perceived as its negative portrayal of homosexuality. He noted that, "in the film of Cabaret, the male lead is called Brian Roberts. He is a bisexual Englishman; he has an affair with Sally and, later, with one of Sally's lovers, a German baron... Brian's homosexual tendency is treated as an indecent but comic weakness to be snickered at, like bed-wetting."

Isherwood's friends, especially the poet Stephen Spender, often lamented how the cinematic and stage adaptations of Goodbye to Berlin glossed over Weimar Berlin's crushing poverty: "There is not a single meal, or club, in the movie Cabaret, that Christopher and I could have afforded [in 1931]." Spender, Isherwood, 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.

References

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