Short Story Wednesday: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

 

Description on the back of the book:

Set in the 1930s, Goodbye to Berlin evokes the glamour and sleaze, excess and repression of Berlin society. Isherwood shows the lives of people under threat from the rise of the Nazis: a wealthy Jewish heiress, Natalia Landauer, a gay couple, Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles.

I was disappointed when I read Goodbye to Berlin, and I think that was because my expectations of the book were based on Cabaret (the film). I did not expect the stories to be so depressing. And I expected more of Sally Bowles in the stories, since she is such a big focus in the film. I do much better reading a book when I go in with no expectations. 

Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939, consists of six connected short stories. The stories are semi-autobiographical. They depicted the poverty in Germany in the early 1930s more realistically than the movie. So, this book is a better depiction of the time, but not what I expected. Isherwood uses his own name for the narrator. 

In the first story, "A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)," the narrator is living in a room in the house of a woman, Fraulein Shroeder, who once lived alone. She has been renting rooms for 30 years, but now, "Frl. Shroeder has not even got a room of her own; she has to sleep in the living room behind a screen on a small sofa with broken springs."

The second story, "Sally Bowles," is the longest in the book. It focuses on the time that Christopher knew Sally, a singer and actress. It was not my favorite story.

"On Ruegen Island" is about three young men spending the summer on an island.  "The Nowaks" is about a strange and impoverished family that Christopher lives with; Otto Nowak was one of the young men in the previous story. In "The Nowaks", the characters discuss characters in "The Landauers", the fifth story. Natalia Landauer is a very young Jewish woman, the daughter of affluent parents who hire Christopher to give her English lessons. Natalia is more interested in learning about Christopher and gossiping.

"A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3)," is the sixth and last story. It is the shortest story, only 25 pages. It consists of brief vignettes, written like diary entries, that describe the situation in Berlin as it gets worse and worse. Christopher decides he must leave for good. 

I suspect that if I take the time to reread the stories in Goodbye to Berlin, I will find the book more appealing on a second read.