Goodbye to Berlin

I knew nothing of either this book or its author when I picked it up. I was merely compelled to do so because the blurb revealed that it was set in Berlin, a city which I will soon be visiting - and in which I might even be residing. I hoped to get a good vicarious understanding of the city through reading it. I can't say that this hope was completely gratified. I did, however, learn a great deal about the city's denizens and its political crises in the 30s, pre-Hitler. The narrator of the book is also called Christopher Isherwood. This he attempts to explain in the preface: "Because I have given my own name to the 'I' of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libellously exact portraits of living persons. 'Christopher Isherwood' is a convenient ventriloquist's dummy, nothing more." In other words, this is very thinly veiled autobiography. The narrator even mentions a book he wrote - "All The Conspirators" - which the real-life writer also composed. I must admit, this didn't particularly bother me - just thought I should point it out. There is something enchanting about Isherwood's prose. It is extremely passive, for one thing; rarely does the narrator reveal his feelings; he is, as he says, "...a camera with its shutters open, quite passive, recording, not thinking." He recounts several enticing, sometimes jarring, anecdotes about living as an English teacher in Berlin's capital, forced to live in murky working-class tenements and uninhabitable attics, or in idyllic villas with querulous homosexuals. What makes this little novel of vignettes special, though, is the characters. Each of them is so realistically rendered that one might be inclined to think that they really did exist - and, truth be told, they probably did, only under different names. They are fascinating, in any event.

The opening page of Goodbye to Berlin contains one of the Twentieth Century's most famous sentences: 'I am a Camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.' One of the most famous, yet also most disengenuous sentences. For Christopher Isherwood might have wished readers to think that his authorial persona - wry, detatched, passive, laconic - was actually his real personality, but we know the reality - lithe and limber boys in bathhouses, for instance - was rather more colourful. In the end, Isherwood couldn't distinguish between what was real, and what was a product of his imagination, the two bled into each other, giving result to an immaculate set of writings from his Berlin period when he was living poor in guesthouses, teaching English and recording the final months of early thirties Berlin Bohemia with the menacing shadow of Hitler imposing on the edges, and moving ever more darkly towards the centre. Goodbye to Berlin contains some of Isherwood's choicest writings. There is the memorable tale of Sally Bowles, a feckless slightly aristocratic girl who sleeps with producers in the hope of making her big break and sings clubs (badly) in the evening. Her story inspired the musical 'Cabaret', and Isherwood creates a superb portrait of a young glamorous woman using her transient sex appeal to manipulate men and their emotions. What Kingsley Amis described as Isherwood's 'boyhorn' features, with a tale of Otto and Peter, a quarreling gay couple who struggle with their sexuality in the homophobic atmosphere of pre-war Berlin. Then there is Natalia Landauer, the rich Jewish Heiress of a wealthy family, and the poor and Frau Schroder, the plump, caring landlady who is intrigued by the patrician Isherwood and is enthralled by his stories 'Quite right Herr Isssyvoo!' The passive prose style is a perfect foil for this decadent era in Weimar Germany. The people Isherwood describes are often selfish and feckless, but always bursting with humanity. The book concludes with a description of Jewish shop owners suffering increasing intimidation for Nazi bully boys. The back end of that famous camera sentence: 'one day this will have to be recorded and fixed'. Well now that period is fixed in history. We know what all this decadence ran into. For that, Goodbye to Berlin makes very poignant and powerful reading.

I was never one for audio books, I thought they were for people too lazy to read the real thing, and that many of them were read without feeling or emotion and sounded a bit like my 9th grade English teacher reading the death of Mercutio scene from Romeo and Juliet. But the combination of one of my favorite books and my favorite actor (Alan Cumming) led me to even buy used to hear what it sounded like. The search was well worth it! Alan puts so much into this brilliant recording. He intimately entwines you in the world of pre-war Berlin before the deluge. He is utterly witty handling the character of Fraulein Schroeder, uproariously funny with the famous Sally Bowles, and when he is Chris the narrator of the book, he takes you on a rollercoaster of emotions, from joy to sorrow to everything in between. Alan knows the book so well as if he came from that world. He captures your attention for the 3 hours that the running time is, and for 3 hours does NOT disappoint! If you're fortunate enough to be able and get a copy of this, I know you'll agree with me, and in the meantime they have to start reprinting this gem among literary and performance gems!