“Autumn 1930. From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.”

Isherwood’s narrator of these stories of early 1930’s Berlin, a city in transition from the ‘decadence’ of the Weimar Republic to the repression of the Nazis, claims to be a passive observer, famously claiming “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking”. To what extent that claim was sustained is debateable – it is surely not possible to simply observe events without having some impact upon them. But perhaps what Isherwood was intending to suggest is that his narrator was not being judgmental about what he observed, neither condemning nor approving. Which makes me wonder – why? Why would you witness at first-hand momentous political change, change which you would have a unique insight into having been a part of, and which would have a profound impact on the whole world, and have nothing to say about it? Is Isherwood genuinely intending to be a passive observer, or is something else going on here?

Taking a step back, for context, Goodbye to Berlin features six stories all narrated by ‘Christopher Isherwood’, a persona we can assume is as close as it is possible to be to the author himself. The novel opens in autumn 1930 with Christopher, an English writer, living in Berlin. We are not told why he finds himself there. He lives in a boarding house run by Fraulein Schroeder and meets her other guests including Bobby, a bartender, “a pale, worried-looking, smartly dressed young man with thin sleek black hair”, Fraulein Kost, a prostitute, (“a blonde florid girl with large silly blue eyes“) and Fraulein Mayr, (who has a “bull-dog jaw, enormous arms, and string-coloured hair”) a professional yodeller and “an ardent Nazi“. Despite their differences this is a relatively harmonious household, in which being a Nazi was not really something worth mentioning, and certainly not a reason to ostracise someone.

At around this time, Christopher meets Sally Bowles, a 19-year-old English actress. The first time he meets Sally she is “dressed in black silk, with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head” with emerald green fingernails, and her face “powdered dead white“. Sally is totally open about her sexual adventurousness – “That’s the man I slept with last night…He makes love marvellously”….”I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I’ve got a marvellous new lover”. Some of this frankness is intended to shock (“Do I shock you when I talk like that Christopher?”) but is largely just an expression of her lack of inhibition. Sally sings at a bar, the Lady Windermere, and has a series of wealthy gentlemen lovers who take care of her financially. She moves into Fraulein Schroeder’s boarding house as her friendship with Christopher becomes closer. At one point they meet a wealthy businessman, Clive, who showers them with money and gifts. Sally has hopes that he will help fund her acting career, but as quickly as he arrives, Clive disappears.

Unfortunately it is just at this point that Sally finds out that she is pregnant. She uses money left by Clive prior to his disappearance to pay for an abortion, telling the ‘nursing home’ staff that Christopher is the father. Although they don’t realise it at the time, this incident marks the turning point of their friendship. Christopher’s source of income is never mentioned, but he can afford a break from Berlin in the form of holiday by the Baltic, where he meets teenager Otto Nowak and Englishman Peter Wilkinson. These non-Berlin scenes are very different from the earlier chapters. Peter pays Otto to spend time with him and gets jealous when he wants to stay out late and go dancing with girls. The text avoids any direct implication that theirs is a homosexual relationship, but it can certainly be read that way. This is the case with almost all of the novel’s treatment of gay relationships, including Christopher’s own – they all exist between the lines but are not expressly referred to. Back in Berlin Christopher moves in with Otto’s family, sharing their small attic apartment.

In the background, the novel’s references to the Nazi Party steadily increase as the years pass and as the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor approaches. While on his holiday, Christopher reports this conversation with two Hitler Youth members:

“He’s dead”. “You don’t say”. “Heart failure…. There’s a lot of heart failure in Germany these days….If you ask me anyone’s heart’s liable to fail if it gets a bullet inside it.”

The Austrian looked very uncomfortable. “Those Nazis….” he began. “They mean business.” The fat man seemed rather to enjoy making his friend’s flesh creep. ‘You mark my words, they’re going to clear the Jews right out of Germany, Right out….Concentration camps….They get them in there, make them sign things…then their hearts fail.”

Isherwood’s portrait of any opposition to the Nazis is dismissive. In the Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3) chapter which ends the novel, he describes attending a Communist ‘dive’ near the zoo. “The cafe was full of students, dressed mostly with aggressive political untidiness – the men in sailor’s sweaters and stained baggy trousers, the girls in ill-fitting jumpers, skirts held visibly together with safety-pins and carelessly knotted gaudy gipsy scarves.” As a force to oppose the Nazis they are comically unqualified.

So why does Isherwood simply record what he sees, despite the rising and unavoidable tide of bloody violence towards Jews, Communists, and (although it is not mentioned here) gay people and others? A charitable interpretation is that the author is letting the events tell their own story and leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. The portrait of Berlin is not a simple Nazis = Bad, ordinary Berliners = Good narrative. In showing the decadent side of Berlin he risks feeding Nazi propaganda about the need for a moral renewal of the country. As George Orwell wrote in his review of the novel ” Reading such tales as this, the thing that surprises one is not that Hitler came to power, but that he did not do so several years earlier.“

Isherwood is at pains to avoid directly condemning the Nazis even when his friends are at risk and are eventually being murdered. This is taking neutrality too far surely? A more critical interpretation would be that Isherwood genuinely had no interest in the politics of early 1930’s Berlin, and simply recorded what he saw, only later adding the violence of the Nazis when it had become unavoidable. There is some biographical detail that suggests this is the explanation that is closest to the truth, but it is unsatisfactory, because taking the narrative entirely on its own – disregarding what we know about Isherwood the author, the book can still be read as a chilling record of the seemingly inevitable rise of the Nazis. One can choose to accept that Goodbye to Berlin is an honest, authentic account of Isherwood’s time in Germany – or not. It is of course fiction rather than autobiography, (although there are obvious autobiographical elements), so Isherwood was not under the obligations for accuracy that would apply to a journalist or a historian. As an account of life in Berlin in the early 1930’s, albeit for a small sub-section of society, the novel gives an insight into what those years must have been like – dangerous, frightening, but also exciting. By the end of the novel all that promise has evaporated, and the spectre of the war looms over everything. An alternative reading is that the text is only superficially neutral, but nevertheless clearly shows how the Nazis came to power and how the German people acquiesced in that assumption. For me this is a more compelling reading of the novel. I am a camera – well maybe. But the choices made in what to show the reader and what to omit was not a neutral act but an editing of events that help the reader understand the politics of |Germany.

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, 1939