The Berlin Stories

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The Berlin Stories
TheBerlinStories.jpg
First edition
AuthorChristopher Isherwood
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
PublisherNew Directions
Publication date
1945
Media typePrint (Hardback & Paperback)
ISBN0-8112-1804-X
OCLC2709284

The Berlin Stories is a book consisting of two novellas by Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains. It was published in 1945. The collection was chosen as one of the Time 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th century.[1]

Historical background[]

The events depicted in The Berlin Stories are derived from Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood's colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic.[2][3] In 1929, Isherwood moved to Weimar Berlin during the final months of the Golden Twenties. At the time, Isherwood was an apprentice novelist who was politically indifferent[a] about the rise of fascism in Germany.[6][7] He had relocated to Berlin in order to pursue a hedonistic life as an openly gay man and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.[8][9] He socialized with a blithe coterie of gay writers that included Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles,[b] and W.H. Auden.[10][12]

In Berlin, Isherwood met Gerald Hamilton, an unscrupulous businessman who inspired the fictional character of gay entrepreneur Mr. Norris. Isherwood also shared modest lodgings with 19-year-old Jean Ross,[c] a British cabaret singer who inspired the fictional character of Sally Bowles.[14] An aspiring film actress, Ross earned her living as a chanteuse in lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets.[14][15] While rooming together with Isherwood at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg,[16] Ross became pregnant.[17][18] She assumed the father of the child to be jazz pianist—and later actor—Peter van Eyck.[18] Following Eyck's abandonment of Ross, she underwent an abortion facilitated by Isherwood.[19][20] Ross nearly died as a result of the botched abortion.[18][21]

While Ross recovered from the abortion procedure, the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Germany.[22] As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right,"[23] Isherwood, Spender, and other British nationals soon realized that they must leave the country.[22][24] "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled.[22] By the time the Nazi Party attained a plurality in the July 1932 elections, Isherwood had departed Germany and returned to England.[25] Afterwards, most of Berlin's seedy cabarets were shuttered by the Nazis,[d] and many of Isherwood's cabaret friends would later flee abroad or perish in concentration camps.[27] These factual events served as the genesis for Isherwood's Berlin tales. His 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin was later adapted by playwright John Van Druten into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera and, ultimately, the 1966 Cabaret musical.[20][28]

Plot summary[]

Main articles: Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains

I am a camera with its shutter open.

— Christopher Isherwood

The two novellas are set in Berlin between 1930 and 1933, just as Adolf Hitler was moving into power. Berlin is portrayed by Isherwood during this transition period of cafes and quaint avenues, grotesque nightlife and dreamers, and powerful mobs and millionaires.

The Berlin Stories was the inspiration for the John Van Druten play I Am a Camera, which in turn went on to inspire the film I Am a Camera as well as the stage musical and film version of Cabaret.[29][30]

Sally Bowles is the best-known character from The Berlin Stories because she was the focus of the Cabaret musical and film, although in The Berlin Stories she is only the main character of a single short story in Goodbye to Berlin. The iconic character was based on teenage cabaret singer Jean Ross, Isherwood's intimate friend during his sojourn in Berlin.[31]

Isherwood's reevaluation[]

Although his stories about the nightlife of Weimar Berlin became commercially successful and secured his reputation as an author, Isherwood later denounced his writings.[32] In a 1956 essay, Isherwood lamented that he had not understood the suffering of the people which he depicted.[32] 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."[32]

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Jean Ross later claimed the political indifference of the Sally Bowles character more closely resembled Isherwood and his hedonistic friends,[4] many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the storm troopers looked in their uniforms."[5]
  2. ^ Paul Bowles was an American writer who wrote the novel The Sheltering Sky.[10] Isherwood appropriated his surname for the character of Sally Bowles.[11]
  3. ^ Isherwood claimed that he and Ross "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."[13]
  4. ^ 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.[26]

Citations[]

  1. ^ Grossman 2010.
  2. ^ Garebian 2011, p. 3; Gray 2016.
  3. ^ Bloom & Vlastnik 2004, p. 46.
  4. ^ Firchow 2008, p. 120; Caudwell 1986, pp. 28–29.
  5. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 124–125; Doyle 2013.
  6. ^ Allen 2004: "The real Isherwood... [was] the least political of the so-called Auden group, [and] Isherwood was always guided by his personal motivations rather than by abstract ideas."
  7. ^ Stansky 1976: Isherwood was a "self-indulgent upper middle-class foreign tourist" who was "a good deal less dedicated to political passion than the legend has had it."
  8. ^ 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."
  9. ^ 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."
  10. ^ a b Garebian 2011, pp. 6–7
  11. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144: "Isherwood himself admitted that he named the character of [Sally Bowles] for Paul Bowles, whose 'looks' he liked."
  12. ^ Spender 1977; Spender 1966, pp. 125–130.
  13. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 63.
  14. ^ a b Parker 2004; Parker 2005, p. 205.
  15. ^ 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."
  16. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 63: "Jean moved into a room in the Nollendorfstrasse flat after she met Christopher, early in 1931."
  17. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 244–245.
  18. ^ a b c Parker 2004: "An affair with a Jewish musician called Götz von Eick, who subsequently became an actor in Hollywood under the name Peter van Eyck, led to her becoming pregnant, and she nearly died after an abortion."
  19. ^ Parker 2004; Parker 2005, p. 220; Thomson 2005.
  20. ^ a b Lehmann 1987, pp. 28–29
  21. ^ Parker 2005, p. 220.
  22. ^ a b c Spender 1966, p. 129
  23. ^ Spender 1977.
  24. ^ Parker 2005, p. 254
  25. ^ Isherwood 1976, p. 95
  26. ^ Farina 2013, p. 79
  27. ^ Isherwood 1976, pp. 164–166; Isherwood 1976, pp. 150, 297; Farina 2013, pp. 74–81
  28. ^ Izzo 2001, pp. 97, 144
  29. ^ Lehmann 1987, pp. 78–79.
  30. ^ Izzo 2001, pp. 97, 144.
  31. ^ Izzo 2005, p. 144.
  32. ^ a b c Fryer 1977, pp. 146–47.

Works cited[]

External links[]

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