= The_Berlin_Stories =

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= The_Berlin_Stories =
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Introduction
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'The Berlin Stories' is a 1945 omnibus by English-American writer
Christopher Isherwood, consisting of his two earlier novels 'Mr Norris
Changes Trains' (1935) and 'Goodbye to Berlin' (1939). Set in Jazz Age
Berlin between 1930 and 1933 on the cusp of Adolf Hitler's ascent to
power as Chancellor of Germany, Isherwood portrays the city during
this chaotic interwar period as a carnival of debauchery and despair
inhabited by desperate people who are unaware of the national
catastrophe that awaits them.

The first novel, 'Mr Norris Changes Trains', focuses on the
misadventures of a smuggler, communist, and spy named Arthur Norris, a
character based on Gerald Hamilton, an unscrupulous businessman known
as "the wickedest man in Europe," whom Isherwood met in the Weimar
Republic. The second novel, 'Goodbye to Berlin', recounts the travails
of various Berlin denizens whose lives become directly or indirectly
affected by the Nazis' rise to power. Isherwood based the character of
Sally Bowles on teenage cabaret singer and flapper Jean Ross with whom
he briefly shared lodgings in Berlin.

Isherwood's Berlin tales inspired John Van Druten's 1951 play, 'I Am a
Camera', which in turn inspired the 1955 film, 'I Am a Camera', as
well as the 1966 stage musical and 1972 film version of 'Cabaret'. The
best-known character from the stories, Sally Bowles, took center stage
in these adaptations, even though the character appears as the lead in
only one short story in 'Goodbye to Berlin'.

Although 'The Berlin Stories' secured Isherwood's reputation, the
author denounced his writings after the collection's publication. In a
1956 essay, Isherwood lamented that he misunderstood the suffering of
the people that he depicted, and he regretted depicting many persons
as "monsters". In 2010, 'Time' listed the collection as one of the 100
Best English-language works of the 20th century.

Historical background
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The events depicted in 'The Berlin Stories' are derived from
Isherwood's colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic. In 1929,
Isherwood moved to Weimar Berlin during the twilight of the Golden
Twenties. At the time, Isherwood was an apprentice novelist who was
politically indifferent about the rise of fascism in Germany. He had
relocated to Berlin to pursue a hedonistic life as an openly gay man
and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets. He socialized
with a blithe coterie of gay writers that included Stephen Spender,
Paul Bowles, and W.H. Auden.

In Berlin during Winter 1930-1931, Isherwood met Gerald Hamilton, an
unscrupulous businessman who inspired the fictional character of
Arthur Norris. Like the fictional character which he inspired,
Hamilton was regarded by his fellow British expatriates to be a
"nefarious, amoral, sociopathic, manipulative conniver" who "did not
hesitate to use or abuse friends and enemies alike." Isherwood later
alleged that Hamilton likely stole a large sum of money from him when
the author asked Hamilton to bribe officials in order to rescue his
gay lover Heinz Neddermeyer from persecution by the Nazi regime due to
his sexual orientation.

Due to his limited finances, Isherwood shared modest lodgings in
Berlin with 19-year-old flapper Jean Ross, a British cabaret singer
who inspired the fictional character of Sally Bowles. An aspiring film
actress, Ross earned her living as a chanteuse in lesbian bars and
second-rate cabarets. Isherwood visited these nightclubs to hear Ross
sing, and he later described her voice as poor yet effective.

"She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice," Isherwood wrote, "She sang
badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her
sides--yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of
her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what
people thought of her." Likewise, Stephen Spender recalled that Ross'
singing ability was quite underwhelming: "In my mind's eye, I can see
her now in some dingy bar standing on a platform and singing so
inaudibly that I could not hear her from the back of the room where I
was discreetly seated."

While rooming together with Isherwood at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in
Schöneberg, Ross became pregnant. She assumed the father of the child
to be jazz pianist--and later actor--Peter van Eyck. Following Eyck's
abandonment of Ross, she underwent an abortion facilitated by
Isherwood. Ross nearly died as a result of the botched abortion. This
event inspired Isherwood to write his 1937 novella 'Sally Bowles' and
is dramatized as its narrative climax. (In later years, Ross regretted
her public association with the naïve and apolitical character of
Sally Bowles.) While Ross recovered from the abortion procedure, the
political situation rapidly deteriorated in Germany.
As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political
demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme
left and the extreme right," Ross, Spender, and other foreigners
realized that they must leave the country. "There was a sensation of
doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled. In contrast
to Spender's feeling of impending doom, Isherwood complained "somewhat
unpresciently to Spender that situation in Germany seemed 'very
dull.'"

However, following Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany
on 30 January 1933, Isherwood finally noticed the sinister
developments occurring within the country, and he commented to a
friend: "Adolf, with his rectangular black moustache, has come to stay
and brought all his friends.... Nazis are to be enrolled as 'auxiliary
police,' which means that one must now not only be murdered but that
it is illegal to offer any resistance." Two weeks after Hitler passed
the Enabling Act which cemented his power, Isherwood fled Germany and
returned to England on 5 April 1933.

Following Isherwood's departure from Germany and the enstatement of
Hitler's brutalitarian regime, most of Berlin's seedy cabarets were
shuttered by the Nazis, and many of Isherwood's cabaret friends would
later flee abroad or perish in concentration camps. These factual
events served as the genesis for Isherwood's Berlin tales. His 1939
novel 'Goodbye to Berlin' was later adapted by playwright John Van
Druten into the 1951 Broadway play 'I Am a Camera' and, ultimately,
the 1966 'Cabaret' musical.

''Mr Norris Changes Trains''
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While traveling on a train from the Netherlands to Germany, British
expatriate William Bradshaw meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur
Norris. As they approach the frontier, Bradshaw strikes up a
conversation with Norris, who wears an ill-fitting wig and carries a
forged passport. After crossing the frontier, Norris invites Bradshaw
to dinner, and the two become friends. In Berlin, they see each other
frequently. Over time, several oddities of Norris's personal life are
revealed, one of which is that he is a masochist. Another is that he
is a communist, which is dangerous in Hitler-era Germany. Other
aspects of Norris's personal life remain mysterious. He seems to run a
business with an assistant Schmidt. Norris gets into more and more
straitened circumstances and has to leave Berlin.

Norris subsequently returns with his fortunes restored and apparently
conducting communication with an unknown Frenchwoman called Margot.
Schmidt reappears and tries to blackmail Norris. Norris uses Bradshaw
as a decoy to get an aristocratic friend, Baron Pregnitz, to take a
holiday in Switzerland and meet "Margot" under the guise of a
Dutchman. Bradshaw is urgently recalled by Ludwig Bayer one of the
leaders of the communist groups, who explains that Norris was spying
for the French and both his group and the police know about it.
Bradshaw observes they are being followed by the police and persuades
Norris to leave Germany. After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis eliminate
Bayer and most of Norris's comrades. Bradshaw returns to England where
he receives intermittent postcards from Norris, who has fled Berlin,
pursued by Schmidt. The novel's last words are drawn from a postcard
that Norris sends to Bradshaw from Rio de Janeiro: "'What' have I done
to deserve all this?"

''Goodbye to Berlin''
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After relocating to Berlin in order to work on his novel, an English
writer explores the decadent nightlife of the city and becomes
enmeshed in the colorful lives of a diverse array of Berlin denizens.
He acquires lodgings in a boarding house owned by Fräulein Schroeder,
a caring landlady. At the boarding house, he interacts with the other
tenants, including the frank prostitute Fräulein Kost, who has a
Japanese patron, and the divinely decadent Sally Bowles, a young
Englishwoman who sings in a seedy cabaret. The narrator and Bowles
soon become roommates, and he learns a great deal about her sex life
as well as her coterie of "marvelous" lovers.

When Sally becomes pregnant after a brief fling, the narrator
facilitates an abortion, and the painful incident draws them closer
together. When he visits Sally at the hospital, the hospital staff
assume he is Sally's impregnator and despise him for forcing her to
have an abortion. Later during the summer, he resides at a beach house
near the Baltic Sea with Peter and Otto, a gay couple who are
struggling with their sexual identities. Jealous of Otto's endless
flirtations with other men, Peter departs for England, and the
narrator returns to Berlin to live with Otto's family, the Nowaks.
During this time, he meets teenage Natalie Landauer whose Jewish
family owns a department store. After the Nazis smash the windows of
several Jewish shops, he learns that Natalie's cousin Bernhard is
dead, likely murdered by the Nazis. Ultimately, the narrator is forced
to leave Germany as the Nazis continue their ascent to power, and he
fears that many of his beloved Berlin acquaintances are now dead.

Isherwood's reevaluation
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Although his stories about the nightlife of Weimar Berlin became
commercially successful and secured his reputation as an author,
Isherwood later denounced his writings. In a 1956 essay, Isherwood
lamented that he had not understood the suffering of the people whom
he depicted.

Isherwood stated that 1930s Berlin had been "a real city in which
human beings were suffering the miseries of political violence and
near-starvation. The 'wickedness' of Berlin's night-life was of the
most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags
attached to them.... As for the 'monsters', they were quite ordinary
human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through
illegal methods. The only genuine monster was the young foreigner who
passed gaily through these scenes of desolation, misinterpreting them
to suit his childish fantasy."

See also
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* List of fiction set in Berlin

External links
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*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20051022131702/http://www.time.com/time/2005/100books/0,24459,the_berlin_stories,00.html
Time 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th century]
*
[https://web.archive.org/web/20070228165631/http://www.ndpublishing.com/
New Directions, the publishing company of 'Berlin Stories']
* [http://www.hoboes.com/Mimsy/Books/berlin-stories/ 'The Berlin
Stories']

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