When Christopher Isherwood, the narrator of Isherwood’s novel, arrives, the city of Berlin is one in which no political or social certainty seems to have been left undamaged by the events of the previous ten years.
Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place The world turned upside down
More generally, Isherwood’s Berlin stories portray the legendary artistic, cultural, and sexual tolerance that reigned in the city during the years leading up to the Third Reich. During the 1970s he became a kind of elder statesman for the growing Gay Rights movement in America and Britain, in particular because of his autobiography Christopher and his Kind (1977), in which the homosexual subtext of his Goodbye to Berlin moved more into the foreground of the story. Isherwood moved to the United States in 1939, and later took up residence in Santa Monica, California. The Broadway play, in turn, became the basis for the extremely successful stage musical and the 1972 movie Cabaret, starring Liza Minelli as club singer Sally Bowles. Adapted to the stage in the postwar years, the latter became the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera. Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). He published two novels based on his experiences, The of Mr.
Isherwood experienced Berlin during a period of political tension and violence that was, at the same time, a period of cultural experimentation and artistic energy. This period saw the curtain come down on Germany’s first parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic, when the constitution and the political culture proved unable to withstand the continual attacks from both the Nazi Party with its uniformed cohorts on the right of the political spectrum and the communists on the left.
In 1929 he went to Berlin, where, like his novel’s narrator, he remained for four years. Over a three-year period he becomes deeply involved with a number of memorable Berlin characters and observes the disintegration of the German political system that leads to Hitler’s rise to power.Įvents in History at the Time the Novel Takes PlaceĮvents in History at the Time the Novel Was WrittenĬhristopher Isherwood (1904-86) was born in High Lane, Cheshire, England. A semi-autobiographical novel, set In Berlin at the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the Hmi era first published In 1939.Ĭhristopher, a young Englishman, lives in Berlin in the early 1930s and earns a small income from teaching English in private homes.
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