The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood

The stories are set in the years Isherwood lived in Berlin, 1929-1933. The first story, The Last of Mr. Norris, a novella taking up the first half of the volume, was originally published in 1935 as Mr. Norris Changes Trains. The second half consists of several linked short stories and small pieces like diary entries that were brought out together under the name Goodbye to Berlin in 1939. Some of the individual pieces had already appeared separately including “Sally Bowles,” published in 1937. Put in chronological order and with several shared characters, the individual stories work as kind of a second novella, which is also, of course, a kind of memoir of Isherwood’s time in Berlin. Several of the characters in Goodbye to Berlin also appear in The Last of Mr. Norris, unifying the whole work. The complete collection, including all of Goodbye to Berlin and The Last of Mr. Norris was published in 1945.

My New Directions paperback edition includes a foreword by Isherwood dated 1954. The Last of Mr. Norris is 191 pages. Page numbering starts again with Goodbye to Berlin. There’s a printing error in my copy: Page 96 in Goodbye to Berlin is also printed as page 96 in The Last of Mr. Norris.

In the fall of 1951, John van Druten had a success on Broadway with a play based on the “Sally Bowles” material titled I Am a Camera. Van Druten takes his title from an Isherwood line at the beginning of the first story called, “A Berlin Diary.” “Sally Bowles” is the second story in the series. Outside of that story, Sally Bowles only appears one other time in the book: briefly, in the story about the Jewish department store owners called “The Landauers” where the Isherwood character invites Sally to lunch in order to irritate the Landauers’ up-tight daughter, Natalia.

I Am a Camera became the source material for the musical Cabaret, produced in 1966. By that time, the story had traveled far from the source, published nearly 30 years earlier. Anyone reading Isherwood’s short story and expecting to find Liza Minelli will be disappointed. Isherwood’s Sally Bowles sings at a nightclub called “Lady Windermere”, not the Kit Kat Klub. Isherwood writes, “The Fan itself, four times life size, was displayed above the bar.” (p. 25) There’s a piano in the middle of the room but no band, or MC, and Sally is hardly a star. Isherwood’s landlady, Fraulein Schroeder, has no romance with a Jewish grocer as does the landlady named Fraulein Schneider, in Cabaret. There’s no “pineapple.” And so on. But the milieu is the same: the decadence of the late 1920s, mingled with a precarious economy and unsettled politics, tinged with the rising dread of Nazi-ism. Part of the appeal of the stories is that the reader knows what’s coming while the characters can only speculate and cope. Neither did Isherwood know the full horror when he wrote and published most of these stories before the war. It’s a powerful mix, fascinating, frightening, but also charming, and exciting, and, in Isherwood’s book, exceedingly well-written.

The Last of Mr. Norris begins on a train ride into Berlin where the narrator, named William Bradshaw, meets Arthur Norris. (Isherwood’s full birth name was Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood.) They strike up an improbable friendship which continues in Berlin and throughout the rest of the novella. (in the stories of Goodbye to Berlin, the narrator is simply named Christopher Isherwood while in Cabaret, the Isherwood character is named Clifford Bradshaw). Bradshaw, (let’s just call him Isherwood, shall we?) a young man, has come to Berlin to write a novel, and to support himself teaching English. Arthur Norris is a prissy, narcissistic, older man, born to money but can’t keep it, who now supports himself through shady enterprises which he calls, “import-export” but involves smuggling and carrying messages for various persons in various places around Europe. He has a wealthy friend named Baron von Pregnitz, called Kuno. Von Pregnitz reads boy’s adventure novels and shares with Isherwood his fantasy about living on an island of boys. Norris, meanwhile, indulges in heterosexual S+M episodes with prostitutes named Olga and Anni. Norris also has a secretary named Schmidt, who protects him from creditors, but also blackmails him. The story is set against a background of politics with Isherwood and his circle allied with the communists, led by a man named Bayer, against the Nazi’s.

All of these threads come together in the primary action of the novel when Norris involves Isherwood in one of his schemes. Norris gets Isherwood to entice Kuno to take a ski vacation, there to allow a man named Margot to meet Kuno. Norris will get paid by Margot if the meeting comes off, which it does, and Norris pays for Isherwood’s trip. Back in Berlin, Isherwood learns from Bayer, the head of the communist group, that Norris has been forwarding sensitive information to Margot. No problem, Bayer, aware of Norris’ actions, thwarted the plot by feeding Norris false information. Now Margot, unhappy with the quality of information he receives from Norris is hoping to recruit Kuno as a new source. Exposed now, and with the police aware of all this, Norris is forced to flee the country. Isherwood, being ignorant of the scheme, is in no danger. (One wonders whether Isherwood himself was actually involved in a scheme like this, even unwittingly.) Kuno eventually does cooperate with Margot and is immediately pounced on by the police. He shoots himself in a train station men’s room before they can arrest him and dies at a hospital. The novella ends with Isherwood receiving postcards from Norris who is bouncing around California and South America pursued by his blackmailing secretary, Schmidt.

Here are the stories of Goodbye to Berlin:

A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930. We are introduced to Isherwood’s landlady, Fraulein Schroeder, and the other tenants of her household. “Bobby is a mixer at a west-end bar called the Troika” (p. 7) Frl. Kost is a prostitute. Frl. Mayr is a semi-successful, aging, cabaret singer. Isherwood has an English student, Frl. Hippi Bernstein. It feels like stage-setting.

Sally Bowles. Isherwood meets Sally through a friend named Fritz Wendel. She’s nineteen, come from England two months earlier. She slurps a lot of “Prairie Oysters.” She sings at Lady Windermere’s, though that gig is about to end and she doesn’t know what she’ll do next. She moves in to Fraulein Schroeder’s house with Isherwood. She has an affair with Klaus, who was her accompanist at Lady Windermere’s. She thinks maybe she’ll be a movie actress. Then Klaus suddenly goes to England ending the affair and leaving Sally pregnant. They meet a rich American named Clive at the Troika, who becomes friends with both of them and entertains them daily. There’s a possibility of romance between Clive and Sally, not with Isherwood, but an imagined future for all three of them together. Clive makes big plans, then skips town, but leaves Sally and Isherwood some money. Sally spends her share on an abortion, which takes place at a nursing home. Isherwood and Frl. Schroeder visit her there. Then Isherwood leaves Berlin for a few months to find a quiet place on the Baltic to work on his novel. When he returns he reconnects with Sally. Sally asks Isherwood to write something for her, which she will publish in a magazine under her own name, and then rudely rejects what Isherwood gives her. Isherwood is solicited by a young con-man, whom he eludes, but, angry at Sally, he gives the guy her address. Sally is taken in. They go to the police, later identify the boy on the street and he’s arrested. That’s the end of the story. Isherwood says he never saw Sally again, just a postcard from Paris, and then one from Rome.

On Ruegen Island. This is the interlude alluded to in “Sally Bowles” where Isherwood goes to the Baltic for a few months to write. He becomes friendly with the two others staying in the house: an Englishman named Peter Wilkinson and a German boy named Otto Nowak. They spend their days at the beach. Peter becomes obsessed with Otto, who toys with him. The story tracks their unhealthy relationship. At the end, Otto breaks it off impetuously and returns to Berlin. Peter goes back to England.

The Nowaks. Back in Berlin, Isherwood temporarily needs a cheaper place to live and ends up staying with the Nowaks. Otto and his mother bicker. Isherwood moves out soon enough. Frau Nowak is a consumptive and is sent to a sanitarium. Otto contacts Isherwood and asks him to accompany him on a visit to the sanitarium.

The Landauers. Isherwood, for an unexplained reason, came from England with a letter of introduction to this wealthy, department store-owning, Jewish, family. In a show of solidarity, after the Jews start to be abused by the fascists, he looks them up. He makes friends with the teen-age daughter, Natalia, and with her older brother, Bernhard, who is a partner in the family business. There’s a scene where Isherwood introduces Natalia to Sally Bowles at a restaurant. The girls don’t get along and it spoils Isherwood’s friendship with Natalia. Natalia leaves Berlin for Paris where she meets and marries a lover. Isherwood is a guest at Bernhard’s flat in Berlin, and at a party at the family estate in Wannsee. The story is mostly of atmosphere as the gathering Nazi menace spells doom for the wealthy Landauers. The story ends with Isherwood leaving Berlin for the last time and overhearing news in Prague that Bernhard has died of “heart trouble” – meaning a bullet in the heart. The elder Landauer has managed to escape to Paris, where he joins Natalia.

A Berlin Diary, Winter 1932-33. The final story, like the first, is a collection of short sketches, like diary entries. Berlin is dissolving. Fraulein Schroeder and Fritz Wendel appear again. Isherwood makes his rounds of the clubs growing ever more pathetic, and observes the politics growing more chaotic. He visits a reformatory for boys and watches fights on the streets and wonders about the future. At the end he leaves Berlin.

The characters are excellent, interesting and seemingly real. The writing is beautiful. The plotting in Mr. Norris is perfect. The atmosphere is full of dread, but the action is fun. Isherwood preserves an authorial distance from everything and reveals little about himself. There’s no hint of his own sexuality, for instance, and little is said about his writing career. Though it is all based on true people and actual events, Isherwood’s final line sums up the reader’s perspective, too, a century later, “No. Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened…” (p. 207).