BOOK REVIEW – CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD –A BERLIN DIARY in GOODBYE TO BERLIN 1939 Vintage Books. A collection of six overlapping short stories set against the backdrop of the declining Weimar republic as Hitler rose to power. Christopher Isherwood, appearing himself as a fictional narrator, lives as a struggling author, teaching English to private students in the German capital, describing his meetings with the decadent, often doomed eccentrics, bohemians, and showgirls around him. The sense of oblivious naivety to the gathering storm around them gives his characters tremendous pathos and tragedy. The title refers not just to Isherwood’s departure from a city he clearly loved, but also to the sense that the Berlin of the early thirties was irrecoverably destroyed by the rise of the Nazis, and the destruction of the Weimar State. Isherwood is evoking an age that will never be seen again. It’s not so much a
story of sorrowful departure as an obituary. A BERLIN DIARY (AUTUMN 1930) Reading with the authenticity of Autobiography, (with many characters thinly disguised versions of real people), the opening story is focused on Fraulein Shroeder, a
kindly landlady at Isherwood’s lodgings, (calling Isherwood Ishyoo) who finds all of her
guests to be dear friends, no matter what they say and do. Even none payment of their rent doesn’t phase her. She proudly shows off where a guest once vomited on the now ruined carpets. Prostitutes bring clients to her upper rooms, but the kindly Fraulein turns a blind eye to it. She gets more upset over a
broken teapot than such soliciting. Nazis live in her flat, bickering and denouncing the Jewish guests, but the Fraulein sees this as comedy rather than potential future bloodshed. Her contentment is only broken when one of the guests steals some money from her, at which point Isherwood breaks off the narrative.
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