Goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood
Book Club June 18, 2023
Goodbye to Berlin reads as a tenuously connected series of character sketches and anecdotes, collected by the author during his years in the city at the end of the Weimar era, teaching English to support himself as he tried to write. The novel famously set off the chain of inspirations (another set of tenuous links) that led eventually to the play and movie Cabaret.
Isherwood’s tone generally ranges from bemused detachment to mild disdain, and sometimes to outright alienation, as the first page contains the well-known passage: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”
But as he is poised at his window, depicting himself as a passive observer, in the very next paragraph he relates how young men come down his street in the autumn evenings and boldly whistle up to their lovers in their own flats on the block. He is not passive in his observation of these rude, passionate, messy pursuits of the necessities of life; rather, his reaction is one of active repulsion: “Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings… I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read.”
On the first page he thus reveals himself as a liar. He is actively on the run from life. Is he being ironic, or is he unaware of his duplicity, un-self-reflective? It is from the point of this self-revelation, knowing or otherwise, that the work unfolds as a novel not a sketchbook, with a direction and a conclusion meaningful to Isherwood the narrator.
He describes his room as a microcosm of the dead Berlin of the past:
The tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar. The washstand like a Gothic shrine. The cupboard is also Gothic, with carved cathedral windows: Bismarck faces the King of Prussia in stained glass. My best chair would do for a bishop’s throne. In the corner three sham medieval halberds (from a theatrical touring company?) are fastened together to form a hatstand.
Isherwood the narrator is hiding in Berlin, among the shadows that the past still casts there. For him it is a labyrinth where he can avoid himself. The connecting thread of the novel is how the city progressively turns into a hall of mirrors, where he must at last catch glimpses of himself, but only through the prisms of other people – without seeming to realize it.
While nightcrawling with the wild English teen runaway Sally Bowles, he meets Clive, a rich American who is happy to pick up the bills as the three lose themselves in weeks of partying. Clive is typically American to English eyes, voluble and outgoing, always ready for a good time. “Yet, even as he appealed to us, I thought I could sometimes detect odd sly flashes of sarcasm. What did he really think of us?”
Isherwood seems oblivious to the notion that, in his condescending and supercilious manner with others, always masked by his charming English politeness and diffidence, he might come across to others in the same way. When Clive suddenly disappears from town, there is a glimmer of reflection: “I imagined him leaving every new town and every new set of acquaintances in much the same sort of way. I sympathized with him, a good deal.”
He encounters a shuffling senior drug addict in a dive bar: “The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No.” By this time it is not hard for the reader to fill in for oneself just who it is saying No.
Isherwood decides to spend the following summer on a working-class resort island, as always claiming that the move is to facilitate his writing. He shares a cabin with another Englishman, Peter, who is close to him in age, and with a German teenager named Otto. In this sketch, the narrator soon seems strangely to disappear almost entirely from the narrative, and the focus falls on Peter as he seems forlornly to pursue a relationship with Otto, without any hint given as to the goal of his pursuit (beyond the priapic association of his name).
Peter, in his lugubrious, hang-dog pursuit seems uncannily to be a golemic projection of Isherwood himself, evidently lacking self-consciousness or capacity for introspection; he seems to want to play house with Otto, but the teen is too energetic and volatile for that. Peter’s desire not only dares not speak its name, but he cowers even from conceiving what he wants.
And so Isherwood’s aloofness progresses via metaphor to a crippled inability to cultivate an inner life, a deficiency that comes to threaten his life spiritually and physically as the Nazi party begins its final ascent to power.
In Berlin he makes friends with Bernhard, a cultured department store manager from a wealthy family. Bernhard’s life has all the trappings of success and happiness, but he is dissatisfied in ways he will not express, and is evidently paralyzed when it comes to making changes. Like Isherwood he hides behind a mask, one of culture and taste. Bernhard seems to be courting Isherwood in enigmatic fashion, but like Peter is unwilling or unable to put a name to his desire.
Finally Isherwood lashes out:
I often wonder why you have anything to do with me at all. I feel sometimes that you actually dislike me, and that you say and do things to show it… what I can’t stand is that you show your resentment by adopting this mock-humble attitude…. Actually, you’re the least humble person I’ve ever met.
Again, Isherwood shows no self-consciousness that this is how he likely comes off to others. Their relationship ends with Bernhard saying:
all this seems to me a little unreal, a little – please don’t be offended, Christopher – trivial, I know that I am getting out of touch with existence… Do you know, there are times when I sit here alone in the evenings, amongst these books and stone figures, and there comes to me such a strange sensation of unreality, as if this were my whole life? Yes, actually, sometimes, I have felt a doubt as to whether our firm – that great building packed from floor to roof with all our accumulation of property – really exists at all, except in my imagination… And then I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.
And with this self-incrimination Bernhard indicts himself, Christopher and Berlin all at once. Unwillingness to face oneself, denial of one’s inner life, leads to loss of empathy, loss of touch with reality, and paralysis; and through this spiritual void the Nazis are able to march to power.
In his soulless wanderings through the labyrinth of the city, Christopher encounters not only the rich and dissipated but also the poor, sick and debased. His encounters begin at last to awaken in him the sense that others are real, and with that comes the beginnings of empathy and a balanced sense of what life is.
He at last takes on Herr N. as a pupil, a middle-class government employee who is planning to emigrate to the United States:
Herr N. talks to me chiefly about his family. He is worried about his son, who is very delicate… His wife is delicate, too. He hopes the journey won’t tire her. He describes her symptoms, and the kind of medicine she is taking… In a tactful, impersonal way we have become quite intimate… Behind everything he says I am aware of an immense sadness.
Herr N. is grappling with the necessities of life no less than the profane whistlers under Christopher’s window. Love, care and sadness, taken together over the years, compose a life. And rather than feeling repulsion from life’s messiness, for the first time in the novel Christopher describes himself as feeling actual intimacy with someone.
And now at last Christopher is able to sense the reality of the Nazi threat, as something more than a joke being played on the citizens of Berlin who unlike him don’t have the option to leave. He is shocked to overhear a conversation between a young Nazi and his girlfriend in a cafe:
“Oh, I know we shall win, all right,” he exclaims impatiently, “but that’s not enough!” He thumps the table with his fist: “Blood must flow!”
The stakes to him now are real. Like Herr N. he at last finds the will to break his paralysis and leave Berlin in pursuit of an authentic life. On the eve of leaving, he visits a cabaret with his friend Fritz. As they leave they encounter a party of rowdy young Americans:
“Say,” he asked Fritz, “what’s on here?”
“Men dressed as women,” Fritz grinned.
The little American simply couldn’t believe it… “Do you mean they’re
queer?”
“Eventually we’re all queer,” drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious
tones…
“You queer, too, hey?” demanded the little American, turning suddenly
on me.
“Yes,” I said, “very queer indeed.”
On the first page of the novel Isherwood describes himself as a camera, a mechanism, recording only the surface features of life without evident capacity for introspection. On the last page he is able to imagine photographic reality in its proper proportion, as something distinct from him and his personal identity and feelings, which are as real to him now as what the camera shows:
I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked1 to see that I am smiling… The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past – like a very good photograph.