1. Isherwood and His Literary Context

1Christopher Isherwood is a fascinating but still rather underrated British novelist. Most of his early life and fiction are characterized by a tension between aspiration and reality, fiction and fact, private and public sphere, as well as self-confidence and insecurity. His cross-cultural fringe existence as an artist and outsider plays a major role in the two novels based on his German experience.

2In the United States, whither Isherwood emigrated in 1939, he is best known as the author of the Berlin Stories, a book comprising the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the basis for the successful stage and film adaptations I am a Camera and the musical Cabaret, starring Liza Minelli in the film of the same name. In Britain, he is predominantly associated with the Auden Circle. This includes W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis and Louis MacNeice. The Auden Generation, to use the title of Samuel Hynes’s influential study1, had a number of things in common : they were all students and close friends at Oxbridge in the 1920s, upper-middle-class, politically left-wing and aspiring poets. Being a novelist, Isherwood was an exception in that respect. If we look at the larger context, in terms of the 1930’s as a literary period, writers such as George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene also come to mind.

3In the increasing political polarization between Communism and Fascism, many of these writers chose to be romantic socialists. In Homage to Catalonia (1938), George Orwell gives a powerful demonstration of what happens when this political idealism is put to the test. Marxism was fashionable among the young, especially because its rhetoric was all about revolution. It was definitely something to shock middle-class parents. Yet, they had absolutely no idea what was going on in the world. Auden, for example, confessed in The New Yorker (3 April 1965) :

We were far too insular and preoccupied with ourselves to know or care what was going on across the Channel. Revolution in Russia, inflation in Germany and Austria, Fascism in Italy, whatever fears or hopes they may have aroused in our elders, went unnoticed by us. Before 1930 I never opened a newspaper2.

4The most important new genre in prose writing at the time was documentary or semi-autobiographical fiction. The term already suggests that there has to be a « tension between referential transparency and aesthetic pursuit »3, to use Philippe Lejeune’s terms. Katherine Bucknell explains the artistic transformation of the autobiographical raw material of such novels in the following way :

Common sense says it is writing that is based at least partly on something that actually happened to the author, but in which the author makes changes for one or more of various reasons, such as : a wish to improve the truth ; a reluctance to reveal the truth ; or a conviction that in order to convey the truth of « real life », the author has to change it, has to get at a particular essential quality which might not be expressed by a simple reporting of facts4.

5Many writers worked like journalists at that time, equipped with portable typewriters, notebooks, diaries and cameras. Travel books, journals, reports and documentaries were hugely popular and publishers paid good money for them5. This obviously had an impact on the language as well. In his essay « Why I Write » (1947), George Orwell stresses the necessity of pure language and style when he says : « Good prose is like a window pane »6. Along with Orwell, Isherwood is generally acknowledged to be one of the most important representatives of this new development.

2. Berlin in the 1920s

6In the 1920s, Berlin was the most modern city in Europe. It had pioneering water, gas and electrical installations and the biggest community transport system (including electrical trams) in the world7. « Red Berlin », as it came to be known, had quickly turned into an industrial centre with such companies as Siemens, AGFA or AEG. It attracted thousands of workers from the surrounding rural areas. It was predominantly left-wing liberal and a stronghold of both the Social Democrats and the Communists. The population had increased by leaps and bounds. Berlin was the fastest growing and the third largest city in the world after New York and London. With the establishment of Greater Berlin in 1920, a conglomerate of 8 towns, the city suddenly covered an area of 340 square miles and its population soared to over four million at the end of the decade. In 1930, there were about a quarter of a million foreigners in the city and 173,000 Jews. The city council constructed 44,000 new homes in that year alone8.

7Otto Friedrich tries to capture the mood of the time in the following way : « Above all, Berlin in the 1920’ s represented a state of mind, a sense of freedom and exhilaration »9. It was the Weimar Republic with its very liberal legislation that guaranteed a maximum of personal freedom. Berlin became a serious rival to Paris and the focal point of Europe.

8Cheap living conditions, the promise of a bohemian life and an atmosphere of bustling creativity turned the city into the Mecca of young aspiring artists. Yet, the « Golden Twenties » were the proverbial dance on the volcano and lasted for no more than five years, roughly the time between 1924 and 1929, when the international world of finance collapsed. On 25 September Wall Street suffered a devastating crash of the stock exchange. Known as « Black Friday », this incident had dire consequences for the German nation, where everything was dependent on foreign capital and loans. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and President Hindenburg ruled by emergency decrees based on the controversial Article 48. They introduced drastic measures to save the republic from financial collapse. After four months of social benefit cuts and similar economic measures, the Social Democrats brought down the government with a vote of no confidence.

9Germany had returned to the chaotic state of the years between 1918 and 1923. Out of the 4,000,000 inhabitants of Berlin 750,000 were unemployed in 193010. In mid-July banks had to be closed as they were no longer able to pay out money. This was just one of the many elements that paved the way for the Nazis’ rise to power, who achieved nationwide strength and influence only as late as 1930.

10Berlin held a great attraction for young artists, but in Isherwood’s case there was more to it. He failed miserably at Cambridge, where he studied history, and at London, where he tried his luck with medicine. What he really needed was to get away from English society with its strict class system and repressive morality. As a young homosexual he longed for the relative liberty of Berlin, where boy bars were nothing out of the ordinary. But it was more than sexual gratification. In his autobiography Christopher and His Kind – a consciously chosen programmatic title – he says, « I’m looking for my homeland and I’ve come to find out if this is it »11. It was also a chance to prove himself. Having missed the First World War, there was no opportunity to demonstrate that he was indeed a man. « Like most of my generation, I was obsessed by a complex of terrors and longings connected with the idea War. War, in this purely neurotic sense, meant The Test. The test of your courage, of your maturity, of your sexual prowess : Are you really a Man ? »12.

3. Isherwood’s Berlin Years

11In this paper, I shall focus on Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, the two novels set during those crucial years before the Nazi takeover. Despite their many differences and substantial autobiographical content I treat them as a unity and as works of fiction. This is especially relevant as my arguments are supported by these texts but contradict some of Isherwood’s actual experiences. What I intend to show is how an outsider becomes witness to a process of moral, social and political degradation that plays itself out on the borderline between the private and the public. I would like to concentrate now on the beginning of Goodbye to Berlin, which takes us right into the topic of urban landscapes :

a berlin diary
Autumn 1930
From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of the top-heavy balconied façades, 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.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed13.

12From the first few lines onwards we see how narrative technique and the representation of Berlin in the two novels are closely linked. In this opening paragraph we are presented with an impressionistic description of the whole district that at first seems to be fairly neutral, like the raw material of scientific research, collected but not commented or analysed by the author. But then we learn that the houses looked « like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class ». This is clearly not a case of « recording, not thinking », but a downright contradiction of any claim to (visual) objectivity which the sentence « I am a camera... » might suggest. Furthermore, this first section of the book is entitled « A Berlin Diary : Autumn 1930 ». A diary, by common definition, is a personal and therefore subjective account of one’s life, written immediately after the actual occurrences and without the benefit of hindsight or substantial reflection14. In the context of autobiographical fiction, it is therefore legitimate to ask how far we can trust this narrator. Does the author have the right to use a novelist’s licence to deliberately tamper with the truth and mislead the reader by insinuating that it is all fact ? In his dissertation on Isherwood, Robert Treu offers a seemingly contradictory, but appropriate explanation : « Isherwood felt he was introducing greater objectivity into his work when he turned to the first person narrator of his later novels »15. If we accept the fact that truth is always subjective and fragmentary, the best an author can do under such circumstances is to present his own truth as faithfully as possible. In the preface to Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood comments on the structure of the book :

The six pieces contained in this volume form a roughly continuous narrative. They are the only existing fragments of what was originally planned as a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin. I had intended to call it The Lost. My old title has been changed, however ; it is too grandiose for this short loosely connected sequence of diaries and sketches16.

13Along with critics such as Treu or Schaffeld17 I would argue that Goodbye to Berlin is far better structured and more of a novel than the author himself claims it to be, but there is no doubt about the fact that Berlin as a public sphere remains surprisingly opaque for the better part of the book. What the narrator as our guide has to offer is his Berlin, as much as we all have our private views of Salzburg, Vienna or Bordeaux18. It is, for the most part, not the city of the travel guides, the international hotels, of politics or high culture, but a city as experienced by a subject through personal exploration and social contacts. I borrow the idea of the two opposite spheres – the private and the public – from Samuel Hynes and will pursue it to a much larger extent for the purpose of this paper.

14The Christopher Isherwood character of Goodbye to Berlin is what would be called an Erasmus student nowadays. You arrive at the railway station or the bus terminal, which are usually part of a vast concrete suburban wasteland. It is essentially a foreign environment in every sense of the word. You cannot speak the language properly and somehow you manage to reach the youth hostel or, if you are lucky, the room that is waiting for you. This small private space quickly becomes a sort of haven, where you feel secure and to which you can retreat. During those first few days or weeks, you need this bit of familiarity to be able to cope with a hostile environment. In the context of Isherwood I am using the word « hostile » consciously. Eleven years after the end of the Great War, Germany was still the enemy in the collective memory of the British population of that time19. We also have to consider that we are talking about a young and rather shy artist in the early 1930s. In both books, Isherwood, the narrator, follows the behavioural pattern of someone who has just arrived, but plans to stay for longer. There is no need to rush out and see all the major sights in a day. Quite the opposite is true. He remains for a long time in the private sphere of living rooms – occasionally exploring Berlin’s nightlife. He gradually gets to know his landlady Frl. Schroeder, the other inhabitants of the flat, the shopkeepers in the street and the rich private pupils whose parents can still afford the luxury of having them learn English with a native speaker. The reader, like the Isherwood character, does not have to face Berlin as some abstract, anthill-like superstructure or gigantic organism, although we do get the occasional panoramic street scene. We are rather allowed to enter the city through its backdoors, the private spheres of its inhabitants. The private sphere is one of the great discoveries of the bourgeoisie. Everyone knows the English saying « My home is my castle » but we are usually not aware of how important a « room of one’s own »20 actually is. The private sphere offers the possibility of closing the door on the world and we know from our own experience how this can be one of the great pleasures in life. But this separation is obviously not a complete one. Apart from becoming a new Robinson Crusoe, there is no way of keeping separated from our social environment forever. If we imagine ourselves as cells of a larger organism, which could be a city or even a nation, we have a membrane that lets substances pass, often without our being aware of it. If there is an epidemic of flu, we might carry the virus home and infect others. How does all that relate to Germany’s capital in the early thirties ?

15Berlin as the organic unity of all its inhabitants was seriously ill: unemployment, poverty, political polarization and street violence were just the major symptoms of this disease. And its virus was spreading fast. In functional societies, such as our own, we have an « immune system », a means of containing such problems, even if the fight against unemployment seems hopeless at times. In the Berlin of Isherwood’s novels, this fight was eventually lost with the Brüning government and the elections of 14 September 1930, which brought a massive victory for the Nazis21. But this was just the culmination of a large-scale decline in all areas of life that had started as early as the Great War and was only temporarily checked by the relative prosperity of the Golden Twenties.

16In essence, both novels deal with survival strategies under the onslaught of a complete social, moral and political breakdown precisely during that period of time. The Germans could no longer close their doors on the public sphere : their private lives were directly affected by unemployment, poverty and fear. To demonstrate his characters’ eventual downfall or adaptation to these specific conditions, Isherwood chose to have a fairly strict chronological basis for the books. The timeframe of Mr Norris Changes Trains corresponds exactly to that of Goodbye to Berlin and Isherwood’s own prolonged stay in Germany, minus the first year. It begins late in 1930 and ends in the early spring of 1933, just after Hitler’s coming to power, the Reichstagsbrand and the introduction of the Enabling Act. Time references are important structural elements, partly because they anchor scenes within the larger temporal framework, partly because they link private experiences to public events. Isherwood carefully plots Mr Norris in such a way that the first few chapters present private settings with hardly any references to the outside world. Yet, there are enough indications in these early parts that something is definitely going wrong, which is most obviously reflected in the characters. Mr Norris himself, who is keeping up the appearance of an English gentleman, is gradually revealed as a perverted crook without morality. His wig is almost symbolic of his chameleon-like ability to blend in with the environment, no matter what that may be like. Frl. Schroeder’s lodgers are also indicative of the social and moral bankruptcy of the time. There is Bobby, a mixer in a west-end bar, Frl. Kost, a prostitute, Frl. Mayr, a music-hall jodlerin and ardent Nazi, and the famous Sally Bowles, a nightclub singer, who is portrayed by Liza Minelli in the film.

17It is right in the middle of Mr Norris, at the end of Chapter 8, that we are suddenly reminded where we are. The book opens up by leaps and bounds and within three pages we are confronted with all the madness that was going on in the German public sphere at the time : Bruning’s controversial politics, the Nazi and Communist threats, street violence, propaganda, Hugenberg’s nationalism and mass-unemployment.

Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere ; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths ; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs, or leaded clubs ; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines. In the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed, and left bleeding on the pavement ; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared22.

18We can almost sense the narrator’s growing uneasiness. In Goodbye to Berlin, on the other hand, Isherwood shows how such outbreaks of street violence simply become a routine, a part of daily life.

One night in October 1930, about a month after the Elections, there was a big row on the Leipzigerstrasse. Gangs of Nazi roughs turned out to demonstrate against the Jews. They manhandled some dark-haired, large-nosed pedestrians, and smashed the windows of all the Jewish shops. The incident was not, in itself, very remarkable ; there were no deaths, very little shooting, not more than a couple of dozen arrests23.

19People are infected with fear. Unchecked, the public sphere encroaches on the private sphere and transforms it along with the physical features of Berlin, the houses, shops, parks and streets. There is a definite correlation between the people and their property or living area. We have already seen this in the very first quotation from the book : « The whole district is like this ». The middle class is forced to watch their houses fall apart and their former possessions fall rapidly into the hands of pawnbrokers. The working class is even worse off. They soon have nothing to sell but themselves. Stephen Wade uses the term « contractual hedonism » to describe this general tendency of the time24. Suffering from a chronic shortage of money, everyone was bound up in contracts and transactions to finance his or her lifestyle. People took on all sorts of jobs and sold what they had or could get hold of.

20When the Isherwood character moves in with the Nowaks, a working-class family, to save money, he gives a quick description of the street where he lives. We become witness to both the progressing degradation of the environment and the brutalization of its inhabitants. I have chosen two passages, a few months apart in the time narrated, to show that the city is going from bad to worse.

The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep, shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woollen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth25.

21Isherwood cannot stand the cramped space of the flat and soon moves out again. On returning to the place he makes the following observation :

The lamps were alight already, as I turned in under the archway and entered the long, damp street, patched here and there with dirty snow. Weak yellow gleams shone out from the cellar shops. At a hand-cart under a gas-flare, a cripple was selling vegetables and fruit. A crowd of youths, with raw, sullen faces, stood watching two boys fighting at the doorway : a girl’s voice screamed excitedly as one of them tripped and fell. Crossing the muddy courtyard, inhaling the moist, familiar rottenness of the tenement buildings, I thought : Did I really ever live here26 ?

22The upper class, which Isherwood gets to know as a private tutor, has no difficulty in maintaining its standard of living, but the well-to-do have fortified their private property, fearing that the masses might lay siege to them.

Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grünewald. It is difficult to understand why. Their villas, in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box, are crowded together in this dank, dreary pinewood. Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear : their only view is of their neighbour’s backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire’s slum27.

23The fragmentary character of the book is not a deficiency, but a conscious structural device characteristic of a documentary novel that represents reality not as fact, but as individual reactions to those facts. What a public event means in terms of private consequences is the all-important question. A wonderful example is the closing down of banks in mid-July 1931. Frl. Schroeder, Isherwood’s landlady, addresses him in the following manner :

« Herr Issyvoo, what do you think! They’ve shut the Darmstädter and National ! There’ll be thousands ruined, I shouldn’t wonder ! The milkman says we’ll have a civil war in a fortnight ! Whatever do you say to that ! ».
[« Isherwood » went to the nearest branch of a bank where a crowd had assembled.]
A little boy was playing with a hoop amongst the crowd. The hoop ran against a woman’s legs. She flew out at him at once : « Du, sei bloss nicht frech ! Cheeky little brat ! What do you want here ! » Another woman joined in, attacking the scared boy : « Get out! You can’t understand it, can you ? » And another asked, in furious sarcasm : « Have you got your money in the bank too, perhaps ? » The boy fled before their pent-up, exploding rage28.

24It does not matter at all whether their deposits are guaranteed or all money is lost – facts pale in comparison with the emotional response of the masses. With his apocalyptic vision, the milkman, Frl. Schroeder’s political oracle, only heightens the poor woman’s anxiety as it were. This passage shows a typical human behavioural pattern. Unable to cope with a growing feeling of helplessness, people find a certain relief in attacking those that are even weaker than themselves. All of Goodbye to Berlin is presented in terms of private reactions to public events, including the main characters’ and the first-person narrator’s own strategies for « survival » within this deteriorating social environment.

25This can be exemplified by an important scene in the « Sally Bowles » section of the book, in which Isherwood, Sally and Clive, the American millionaire, become witness to the funeral of Hermann Müller (deceased 20 March 1931), one of the key figures in Social-Democrat politics in the 1920s, when he was still Chancellor of the last functional government.

« Come and cast an eye at the funeral, » Clive was saying.
« What funeral, darling ? » Sally asked, patiently. This was a new kind of interruption.
« Why, say, haven’t you noticed it! » Clive laughed. « It’s a most elegant funeral. It’s been going past for the last hour. » We all three went out on the balcony of Clive’s room. Sure enough, the street below was full of people. They were burying Hermann Müller. Ranks of pale steadfast clerks, government officials, trade union secretaries – the whole drab weary pageant of Prussian Social Democracy – trudged past under their banners towards the silhouetted arches of the Brandenburger Tor, from which the long black streamers stirred slowly in an evening breeze.
« Say, who was this guy, anyway ? » asked Clive, looking down. « I guess he must have been a big swell ? »
« God knows, » Sally answered, yawning. « Look, Clive darling, isn’t it a marvellous sunset ? »
She was quite right. We had nothing to do with those Germans down there, marching, or with the dead man in the coffin, or with the words on the banners29.

26Clive had promised the two to take them on a tour of the world. « With a mere gesture of his wealth, he could alter the whole course of our lives »30. The important thing in this scene is that Sally and Clive are completely unaware of what is going on. They are far too hedonistic to care. « Isherwood », on the other hand, knows exactly what is happening. He is desperately trying to see the funeral with Sally’s eyes but he cannot deny his knowledge and growing attachment to « those Germans down there », as he says. Along with expressions such as « the whole drab weary pageant » or « the dead man in the coffin », this is clearly an attempt to convince himself that the German situation is not his concern. The temptation to simply leave all this weariness and hopelessness behind is enormous. But his guilty conscience tells him otherwise : « Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil »31.

27Another observable contrast between the narrator and his friends consists in their use of language. Clive’s and Sally’s, but also Mr Norris’s discourse is so superficial that it appears to be almost devoid of meaning. Yet, it is not only the English language which suffers from a lack of referential qualities. Like unemployment, violence and fear, the corruption of the German language is spreading throughout the nation with equal speed.

The murder reporters and the jazz-writers had inflated the German language beyond recall. The vocabulary of newspaper invective (traitor, Versailles-lackey, murder-swine, Marx-crook, Hitler-swamp, Red-pest) had come to resemble, through excessive use, the formal phraseology of politeness employed by the Chinese. The word Liebe, soaring from the Goethe standard, was no longer worth a whore’s kiss. Spring, moonlight, youth, roses, girl, darlings, heart, May : such was the miserably devaluated currency dealt in by the authors of all those tangoes, waltzes, and fox-trots which advocated the private escape. Find a dear little sweetheart, they advised, and forget the slump, ignore the unemployed. Fly, they urged us, to Hawaii, to Naples, to the Never-Never-Vienna32.

28One gets the impression that the contagious environment of extreme poverty and excessive violence necessarily transforms the members of the working and middle classes into survivors. People could either adapt or go under. Olga, one of the narrator’s acquaintances, is described in the following way :

Like most people who still contrived to earn a living in those bankrupt days, she was a woman of numerous occupations. [...] ... she was a procuress, a cocaine-seller, and a receiver of stolen goods ; she also let lodgings, took in washing and, when in the mood, did exquisite fancy needlework33.

29At the end of the book we learn what has become of her : « And Olga ? Oh, Olga was doing finely. That remarkable business woman had escaped the clean-up through the influence of one of her customers, an important Nazi official. Others had begun to go there, now. Her future was assured »34. Even Frl. Schroeder knows how to survive.

Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about « Der Führer » to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter35.

30The original title of Isherwood’s ambitious novel project about the German situation was « The Lost ». However, his characters are not as lost as one may think. They have all learnt to adapt to the environment. The frequent animal metaphors even suggest a Darwinian reading. No matter how inhospitable the environment may become, there will always be those who survive. And survive they did.

And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as they could best contrive ; selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway36.

31The second diary section at the end of Goodbye to Berlin, which forms a frame for the four episodes in between, begins with a vision of the capital on a much larger scale than before. Isherwood’s Berlin, this enormous living, breathing entity, his private Berlin, is dying. Having lived in the city for four years, his identification with the place is now complete. The young, insecure, foreign student has transformed into a Berliner and bears witness to the cruelty and death of his city.

a berlin diary
Winter 1932-3
Tonight, for the first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map. Outside, in the night, beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. You can feel them all around you, tonight, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unhomely ocean – sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold; it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.
Berlin is a city with two centres – the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town ; and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings round the Unter den Linden, carefully arranged. In grand international styles, copies of copies, they assert our dignity as a capital city – a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch ; nothing has been forgotten. […]
But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood – the Tiergarten. At this time of the year, the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food, and work. But the city, which glowed so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and dead. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert. It will not receive these boys. It has nothing to give. The cold drives them out of its streets, into the wood which is its cruel heart. And there they cower on benches, to starve and freeze, and dream of their far-away cottage stoves37 (my emphasis).

32Mother Berlin does not provide for her children any longer. This is not the end of the book, but the spell is somehow broken. The lightness and playfulness of some of the earlier sections is now finally replaced by the realization that all is lost. The contamination of Berlin is complete, too. « The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones »38.

33In 1933, Isherwood knows that he will be leaving soon. The resignation one finds in those last pages is not his own. It does not stop him from going out and having fun in the bars of Berlin. But he has definitely given up the city and her inhabitants. There is a strong feeling of inevitability. « Hitler came, and the Reichstag fire, and the mock-elections. I wondered what was happening to Bernhard »39. His cool detachment concerning the most important events in the public sphere is nicely contrasted with his care of Bernhard Landauer, a Jew. Apart from that, all things have stopped to matter. The Germans are definitely ready for their new leader and no spectacle, political or other, can be outrageous enough not to convince the masses. Watching a boxing match whose outcome is perfectly clear from the beginning, « Isherwood » is quite surprised to find the audience taking it all very seriously and betting on the fighters. « The political moral is certainly depressing : these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything »40.

34Both books end on a note of bitter irony. The Nazis have taken over and while they are rounding up all those people who do not fit in with the new world order, Berlin enjoys a perfect spring after a long and hard winter. Isherwood, the author, cleverly combines the peacefulness and beauty of the scene with a description of how the Nazis already dominate the city that is to become the capital of the Third Reich.

Early in March, after the elections it turned suddenly mild and warm. « Hitler’s weather », said the porter’s wife ; […]
Our street looked quite gay when you turned into it and saw the black-white-red flags hanging motionless from windows against the blue spring sky. On the Nollendorfplatz people were sitting out of doors before the café in their overcoats, reading about the coup d’état in Bavaria. Göring spoke from the radio horn at the corner. Germany is awake, he said. An ice-cream shop was open. Uniformed Nazis strode hither and thither, with serious set faces, as though on weighty errands. The newspaper readers by the café turned their heads to watch them pass and smiled and seemed pleased.
They smiled approvingly at these youngsters in their big, swaggering boots who were going to upset the Treaty of Versailles. They were pleased because it would soon be summer, because Hitler had promised to protect the small tradesmen, because their newspapers told them that the good times were coming41.

35Soon there would be no private sphere any more. All these people would become part of the public endeavour to put Hitler’s megalomaniac plans into practice. 12 years later, at the end of the Second World War, his insane vision of a Third Reich had cost the lives of 60 million people, 6 million of them Jews.

Christopher Isherwood compte parmi les représentants anglais les plus connus du roman documentaire ou semi-autobiographique, lequel a connu en particulier un apogée au cours des années 30. En tant que jeune écrivain résidant à Berlin, il a vécu de très près la crise sociale et politique allemande, accélérée par le crash boursier de 1929. Christopher Isherwood s’est penché d’une façon littéraire sur ces évènements dans ses romans intitulés Mr Norris change de train (1935) et Adieu à Berlin (1939). Alors que d’autres études se limitent en grande partie à une interprétation biographique et considèrent Berlin comme étant un simple décor, cet article souligne le lien étroit existant entre les personnages et leur environnement. Il démontre que la séparation, naturelle pour nous, entre la sphère privée et la sphère publique n’était que très difficilement réalisable à cette époque et que la ville reflétait directement le déclin social et politique.