18/11/24
Modern Fiction: Lecture 11 - ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ by Christopher Isherwood (1939).
● Isherwood focuses upon those who do not totally belong and this sense of liminality
becomes central to the text.
● Text has a great historical resonance. Circling around a central threat.
● Tracing the last years of the Weimar Republic before the rise of the Nazis which
leads to a growth of aggression.
● Isherwood places emphasis on adaptability of people.
Christopher Isherwood (1904-86)
● Contemporary of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
● His novel Goodbye to Berlin (pub. 1939) traces the last years of the Weimar Republic
in Germany between 1929-32 and the rise of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler's
culminating appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 - leading ultimately to the
Second World War (1939-45).
Key Issues to Consider When Reading this Text:
1. How is Goodbye to Berlin structured? What kind of novel is it?
6 sections: (1) A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930) (2) Sally Bowles (3) On Ruegen Island
(Summer 1931) (4) The Nowaks (5) The Landaurs (6) A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3)
● 6 impressionistic, fragmentary sketches by the narrator Christopher Isherwood (Herr
Issyvoo) - originally planned as a large episodic novel about Berlin called The Lost
(Die Verlorenen - The Lost Ones, The Forlorn) - referring to both the whole German
nation and the individual characters.
● Sally Bowles (Christopher's roommate based on the cabaret singer Jean Ross)
● Fräulein Schröder (kindly landlady)
● Fräulein Kost (prostitute)
● Otto Novak (bisexual teenager in the family hosting the narrator)
● Peter Wilkinson (lover of Otto)
● Natalie Landauer (intellectual Jewish young woman)
● Bernhard (her cousin, probably murdered by Nazi Brownshirts)
● Klaus Like (musician, makes Sally pregnant).
2. How does Isherwood construct and manipulate his narrative voice?
‘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, fixed.’ (Vintage Classics, p. 9)
● His perspective on his characters is highly subjective and personal - elements of
subversive comedy in the lives of his characters despite their grim circumstances
, ● Otto Umbehr. 'The Racing Reporter' (1926) - a Czech journalist depicted in a photo-
collage as man/robot - chest is a typewriter, one arm is a pen, legs are a plane and a
car and one eye is a camera. (National Gallery of Art Washington DC).
● The novel's impressionistic descriptions of locations - e.g. Fraulein Schroeder's room
- tatty, domestic but almost quasi-religious in Its terminologies.
● Fräulein Schroeder's house - once comfortably bourgeois - now a cheap lodging
house - echoing the financial and social decline of 1920s Germany with its
hyperinflation and post-WWI Treaty of Versailles reparations which effectively
bankrupted the country, (religious imagery, melancholy, objects, time, war).
‘The extraordinary smell in this room when the stove is lighted and the window shut; not
altogether unpleasant, a mixture of incense and stale buns. The 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 ... Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a
phalanx of metal objects - a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray
from which emerges the head of a crocodile, a paper knife copied from a Florentine dagger,
a brass dolphin on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things?
How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years:
people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for
munitions in a war.’ (p. 10)
● Tamas Tukacs explains (" I am a camera": Melancholia in Christopher
Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin', Hungarian Journal of English and American
Studies).
● ‘In Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood presents a portrait gallery, or, to use a metaphor
more closely associated with the novel's imaginary, a photo album', of people
affected by the all-pervasive melancholy of the Berlin of the early 1930s.
Photography, from this perspective, becomes the chief instrument, indeed the
extension of the eye of the middle-class flaneur' (Susan Sontag, 'Melancholy
Objects', in On Photography, 1973).
● Isherwood's narrator records and memorialises a vanishing Berlin, objectively noting
its poverty and diversity. His descriptions are pervaded by a MELANCHOLIA for a
lost world of unregulated human interaction.
3. What was the Weimar Republic and how is it depicted by Isherwood?
Period of democracy, coupled with intense post-WWI creativity in art, literature, music,
cabaret, social freedom and individual self-expression. But also political turmoil and violence,
hyperinflation, economic collapse and poverty, and the ascendancy to power of the Nazis
from 1933. (See Colin Storer, A Short History of the Weimar Republic (2013)).
4. How does it depict contemporary social conditions and poverty in Germany?
In Goodbye to Berlin the section, 'The Nowaks', encapsulates this decaying, declining,
hopeless world:
‘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
Modern Fiction: Lecture 11 - ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ by Christopher Isherwood (1939).
● Isherwood focuses upon those who do not totally belong and this sense of liminality
becomes central to the text.
● Text has a great historical resonance. Circling around a central threat.
● Tracing the last years of the Weimar Republic before the rise of the Nazis which
leads to a growth of aggression.
● Isherwood places emphasis on adaptability of people.
Christopher Isherwood (1904-86)
● Contemporary of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene.
● His novel Goodbye to Berlin (pub. 1939) traces the last years of the Weimar Republic
in Germany between 1929-32 and the rise of the Nazis and Adolph Hitler's
culminating appointment as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 - leading ultimately to the
Second World War (1939-45).
Key Issues to Consider When Reading this Text:
1. How is Goodbye to Berlin structured? What kind of novel is it?
6 sections: (1) A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930) (2) Sally Bowles (3) On Ruegen Island
(Summer 1931) (4) The Nowaks (5) The Landaurs (6) A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3)
● 6 impressionistic, fragmentary sketches by the narrator Christopher Isherwood (Herr
Issyvoo) - originally planned as a large episodic novel about Berlin called The Lost
(Die Verlorenen - The Lost Ones, The Forlorn) - referring to both the whole German
nation and the individual characters.
● Sally Bowles (Christopher's roommate based on the cabaret singer Jean Ross)
● Fräulein Schröder (kindly landlady)
● Fräulein Kost (prostitute)
● Otto Novak (bisexual teenager in the family hosting the narrator)
● Peter Wilkinson (lover of Otto)
● Natalie Landauer (intellectual Jewish young woman)
● Bernhard (her cousin, probably murdered by Nazi Brownshirts)
● Klaus Like (musician, makes Sally pregnant).
2. How does Isherwood construct and manipulate his narrative voice?
‘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, fixed.’ (Vintage Classics, p. 9)
● His perspective on his characters is highly subjective and personal - elements of
subversive comedy in the lives of his characters despite their grim circumstances
, ● Otto Umbehr. 'The Racing Reporter' (1926) - a Czech journalist depicted in a photo-
collage as man/robot - chest is a typewriter, one arm is a pen, legs are a plane and a
car and one eye is a camera. (National Gallery of Art Washington DC).
● The novel's impressionistic descriptions of locations - e.g. Fraulein Schroeder's room
- tatty, domestic but almost quasi-religious in Its terminologies.
● Fräulein Schroeder's house - once comfortably bourgeois - now a cheap lodging
house - echoing the financial and social decline of 1920s Germany with its
hyperinflation and post-WWI Treaty of Versailles reparations which effectively
bankrupted the country, (religious imagery, melancholy, objects, time, war).
‘The extraordinary smell in this room when the stove is lighted and the window shut; not
altogether unpleasant, a mixture of incense and stale buns. The 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 ... Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a
phalanx of metal objects - a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray
from which emerges the head of a crocodile, a paper knife copied from a Florentine dagger,
a brass dolphin on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things?
How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years:
people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for
munitions in a war.’ (p. 10)
● Tamas Tukacs explains (" I am a camera": Melancholia in Christopher
Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin', Hungarian Journal of English and American
Studies).
● ‘In Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood presents a portrait gallery, or, to use a metaphor
more closely associated with the novel's imaginary, a photo album', of people
affected by the all-pervasive melancholy of the Berlin of the early 1930s.
Photography, from this perspective, becomes the chief instrument, indeed the
extension of the eye of the middle-class flaneur' (Susan Sontag, 'Melancholy
Objects', in On Photography, 1973).
● Isherwood's narrator records and memorialises a vanishing Berlin, objectively noting
its poverty and diversity. His descriptions are pervaded by a MELANCHOLIA for a
lost world of unregulated human interaction.
3. What was the Weimar Republic and how is it depicted by Isherwood?
Period of democracy, coupled with intense post-WWI creativity in art, literature, music,
cabaret, social freedom and individual self-expression. But also political turmoil and violence,
hyperinflation, economic collapse and poverty, and the ascendancy to power of the Nazis
from 1933. (See Colin Storer, A Short History of the Weimar Republic (2013)).
4. How does it depict contemporary social conditions and poverty in Germany?
In Goodbye to Berlin the section, 'The Nowaks', encapsulates this decaying, declining,
hopeless world:
‘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
