The Berlin Stories Paperback – September 17, 2008

one of the larger books I own, just give me more to read!

Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 as an English teacher. This book fictionalizes his diaries. He calls himself William Bradshaw, which seem to be his middle names, and in the other half of the book he is Isherwood, or Mr. Issyvoo or Chris or Darling. He says in his 1954 foreword that he had planned to write a Balzaquian novel, but found himself not up to it. What he did instead has been published as The Berlin Stories. The result is charming and mostly satisfactory. I just wish this edition were on par with CI's writing: it abounds with printing errors (worst being the repetition of two pages instead of the new pages that should be there), and it provides no list of contents, which is annoying.Here I give you a list of contents, without page numbers:Half of the book is called: The Last of Mr.Norris. This part has 16 chapters and could be seen as a separate novel.The other half is called: Goodbye to Berlin. This consists of the following parts:A Berlin Diary (1930)Sally BowlesOn Ruegen IslandThe NowaksThe LandauersA Berlin Diary (1932-33)Friends of the film Cabaret will recognize the story `Sally Bowles' as the core of the Broadway play, which became a musical and the basis for the film (which is lovable). (Or was it a musical from the start? Not sure.) The initial stage Sally was, by the way, Julie Harris. Isherwood gives her highest praise in the foreword. (How could you stay the same, Sally, when I aged 20 years? Which, come to think of it, is not all that much of a compliment for Julie Harris, considering the description of Sally that we get in the book.)Don't think that the book Sally is Liza Minelli. She is much less of an accomplished performer than in the film.If you watched the movie before reading the book, you will find that characters and themes have been re-combined, and that the story has been changed quite a lot. I think it has been improved.This edition has an introduction which claims that the book is something like a landmark for gay writing. That may be so, but it would be wrong to expect a political manifest for gay rights. Berlin was and is a center of all kinds of things. Many gays did and do move there, like Isherwood did. His allusions to his gayness are not exactly hidden, but also not written large. Several times he mentions the presence of `boys', leaving little doubt, but explaining nothing. He ridicules a `fairy', the baron, but is mum about his own tendencies. Fair enough. He is much more explicit about the SM habits of eccentric Mr. Norris, probably because that is a) ridiculous, and b) not his own problem.As for the structure of the combined book, I would have kept the Norris part much shorter. The man is a curious freak, but his domination of half of the book gives him more weight than he deserves.CI's main theme is people on the fringe: freaks and eccentrics from various subcultures, or outsiders in another sense, like the wealthy Jewish family. He is politically aware, and describes the troubles times, with poverty and street fighting between communists and Nazis, though they don't seem to concern him personally. Norris, essentially a con man, has some opportunistic involvements with communists, which are narrated like all the other exotic events: observations from outer space. That makes much sense, as Isherwood/Bradshaw is from England.There is one communist event in 1931 where Norris turns up as a speaker about British imperialism in East Asia, while most of the other speakers are addressing Japanese atrocities in China. As far as I know, those started only in the mid 30s, not earlier, so we have an anachronism of the kind that annoys me. Unless something happened in 1930 that I am not aware of, possibly related to the former German colony in Qingdao, now Shandong province, which the Versailles Contract, in the smartness of the allied victors, awarded to Japan rather than returning it to China.All in all I liked the film better. At 400 pages in total, the book has some lengths that the film never has. The explicitly bi-sexual orientation of the Michael York character is more convincing than the strangely neutral narrator Bradshaw/Issyvoo.I would give 3.5 stars, deducting for the flaws in the edition and the weaknesses of the book itself.

I'm acting in a production of "Cabaret" and decided to read the book on which it is loosely based, just for a little background. I wasn't at all familiar with Christopher Isherwood, so I had no idea what to expect.I'm a bit of a pre-WWII German history nerd so I knew a fair amount about the politics of the period, but knew nothing about the cabaret culture and the people who inhabited that world. I was immediately drawn in, and didn't want to put the book down when it ended. The characters are well-drawn, and even the not-so-likeable were portrayed as multifaceted, complex human beings -- real people -- living in an amoral, hedonistic culture where pretty much everything was permissible. Most chose not to see what was going on outside their own little part of Berlin, and were indifferent to it if they did see. And why not? They moved in a time and place that were somehow outside reality. Few of them were rich, but many were capable of living as if they were, simply by telling a few lies and acting the part. One could get money, one way or another. Pleasure was the goal, and if one stayed in the right circle, life was a party.There was, as there always is, another side of the story. In this case, it was the poor who lived outside the charmed circle, scraping by any way they could. Their existence was day-to-day, with hunger, disease, miserable living conditions and winter cold or oppressive summer heat as their constant companions. Isherwood drew these characters, too, as complex humans, motivated not by the pursuit of pleasure but by the desire to survive.After reading "The Berlin Stories" I spent quite a bit of time online, finding out more not only about the cabaret culture, but about Berlin in they months preceding the Nazi takeover of the German government. What a time it was. And to think I discovered it because I'm in a play and simply wanted to find some stuff to help me develop my character.

Having seen Cabaret, I was certainly aware of Christopher Isherwood. After reading a biography of Joel Grey, my interest was further piqued and I decided to buy Isherwood's "The Berlin Stories," upon which "I Am a Camera" and "Cabaret" were based. Isherwood is a wonderful writer and stylist. The second paragraph in his novel, "A Berlin Diary" (the second novel in this book) is one of the most finely crafted paragraphs I've ever read: "I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."The characters are wonderfully developed. Isherwood does a masterful job of describing their everyday lives against a background in which the Nazi presence is at first only fleetingly acknowledged and then steadily becomes a larger and more menacing presence as the stories progress. His ability to focus on everyday life while merely implying the terror that is about to engulf their society gives that threat of terror even greater impact. This book is a masterpiece of style and great story-telling.