"Goodbye to Berlin" by Christopher Isherwood

This isn't a novel, nor is it a series of short stories; it isn't a diary and it is clearly fiction so it isn't a memoir. It is a somewhat ramshackle portmanteau of vignettes designed to show Berlin between 1930 and 1933. 

In the second paragraph, the author states his ostensible purpose: "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." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) As this conceit suggests, this book contains a lot of quite wonderful descriptions:

• "Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields ... the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched." (On Reugen Island)
• "The cheap jewellery of the Kurhaus lights reflected in the black water." (On Reugen Island)
• "They all thronged around us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines." (The Nowaks)

But 'the camera' isn't as passive as the author pretends. It's not just that it records conversations (and Isherwood has a delightful ear for dialogue, many of the characters are defined largely by the way they talk). Isherwood is author, and narrator, and the lead character, making this an early example of autofiction. I wonder whether this conflating of author and protagonist might have been suggested by the interaction of subject and object in quantum physics, which was being discussed in the mid to late 1920s.

Nevertheless, the 'camera' conceit enables the narrator to be non-judgemental. He is remarkably tolerant of the wide variety of people he encounters, and he stays scrupulously neutral for most of the book (not perhaps in the final section) despite the period covered by the book being a time of tremendous social and political upheaval which culminated in the rise of the Nazi party. Some of my fellow book club readers felt that such neutrality meant that Isherwood was condoning Nazism but it seemed to me that this was not the case. He frequently makes observations, almost in passing, which record Nazi thuggery. He describes a Nazi parade and the impression it makes on him thus: “In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine per cent of the population of the world, with the men and women who earn their living, who insure their lives, who are anxious about the future of their children. Perhaps in the Middle Ages people felt like this, when they believed themselves to have sold their souls to the Devil. It was a curious, exhilarating, not unpleasant sensation: but, at the same time, I felt slightly scared. Yes, I said to myself, I’ve done it, now. I am lost.” (Sally Bowles) Forfeiting kinship, selling souls to the devil, and being lost seem to me to be condemning the Nazis. The final section of the book is hard-hitting. But most importantly, he was writing at a time when many of the characters he describes, such as the promiscuous Sally and Otto the rent boy, would have been vilified by the English society in which his readers lived and his profession of neutrality was perhaps the only way, or so he might have believed at the time, for these characters to be accorded respect.

The Guardian said: "Reading this novel is much like overhearing anecdotes in a crowded bar while history knocks impatiently on the window." George Orwell called it "brilliant sketches of a society in decay."

Much of the book explores the difference between what appears to be and the reality beneath (not something that a camera can do). The first paragraph describes Berlin: "From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops, where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930) This is a town of faded grandeur. It is a city that had become a byword for decadent night-life, both straight and gay (the author is homosexual) and all the possibilities of the rainbow. But this was a background of serious economic weakness following Germany's defeat in the First World War and the subsequent political turmoil. This first paragraph seems to encapsulate the idea of faded grandeur, and the idea that the city was rotten behind its impressive frontage.

This theme of superficiality versus reality is found throughout the book. For example, in the first section we are introduced to Christopher's landlady Fraulein Schroder, who pretends that her lodgers are guests and that she was, and is, better than she appears. She insists that she has “got the money to be independent” but she spends her days cleaning and gossiping and empties chamber pots. She talks about past lodgers including “a Freiherr [Baron] once, and a Rittmeister [a captain in the cavalry] and a Professor”, and the son of a surgeon. Now she has “Herr Issyvoo”, a barman, a lady who yodels in music-halls, and a prostitute. Her best friend Fraulein Mayr is another such who talks about the days when she was “a slip of a girl”; now “the muscles of Frl Mayer’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetizingly.” Outside the lodgings, Christopher gives private tuition in the district in which they rich live; this provides another contrast between the dream and the reality: "Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grunewald. It is difficult to understand why. ... Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear: their only view is of their neighbour's backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire's slum." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)

In the second section we are introduced to the marvellously over-the-top Sally Bowles, and again we see the contrast between hope and truth: her clothes Sally’s clothes “produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in a grand opera”; Sally paints her fingernails bright green which only draws attention to her dirty fingers. Sally is a wannabe actress and sings in night-clubs, she is promiscuous with a succession of boyfriends, all of whom she exploits but she is a hopeless gold-digger, a poor lover abandons her for richer pickings, a rich man promises to take her for a tour of Europe but departs alone, a sixteen-year-old con artist swindles her out of some savings.

The third and fourth sections focus on Otto, a poor young boy who goes 'gay for pay'. We first meet him as the 'companion' of Peter in a seaside resort; he torments Peter by repeatedly going dancing with girls and later dumps him. We rediscover Otto in his poverty-stricken working-class family when Christopher, down on his luck, lodges with them, sharing Otto's room. The family is one of contrasts: the father a communist, the elder son a Nazi who earns a few pennies where he can, Otto, who sleeps in and doesn't work, until he returns home with twenty mark notes, having done something his mother knows is shameful. In some ways Otto is a male version of Sally.

Apparently, Otto was in real life Walter Wolff, a young man with whom Isherwood had a sexual relationship.

In the fifth section we meet the Landauers, a rich Jewish family who own a posh department store. The young girl, Natalia, who, when perplexed, says “Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” (whatever that means) is a perfect innocent in contrast with Sally. It’s never quite clear what she means by this (her English is imperfect) but this doesn’t seem to matter. The father of the family wanted to be an academic, Bernhard's ambition was to be a sculptor, but they both spend their lives working for the family firm: it doesn't really matter if you are rich or poor, your dreams are undermined by economic reality.

The final section, set in the winter of 1932 - 1933, is one of bleak despair ... and scarily appropriate to today.

• "Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold ... I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railways, in the iron work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "People like Bobby are their jobs - take the job away and they partially cease to exist." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell - themselves included." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "Most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)
• "You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives ... But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down." (Berlin Diary Winter 1932 - 3)

The characterisations are brilliant. The dialogue, often at cross-purposes, adds tension and complexity and depth to the characters. And the descriptions are stupendous. This is a writer at the top of his form.

But I've said it before in this blog and I will repeat it here: I hate it when author's use untranslated foreign language. Is every reader supposed to know German? Or is the author just showing off? Why doesn't an editor at least add a footnote translating the words? I either have to get out a dictionary or use Google Translate or just skip that bit and wonder whether it was important. All of these actions disrupt the free flow of the reading process and make me dislike the book a little tiny bit; dislikes which can accumulate (as they did, for example, with Trilby by George du Maurier).

Selected quotes:

• "Where, in another ten years, shall I be myself? Certainly not here. How many seas and frontiers shall I have to cross to reach that distant day; how far shall I have to travel, on foot, on horseback, by car, push-bike, aeroplane, steamer, train, life, moving-staircase, and tram? How much money shall I need for that enormous journey? How much food must I gradually, wearily consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer? What an awful tasteless prospect! And yet - to have to die ... A sudden pang of apprehension grips my bowels." (A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930)
• “Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you, can be imposed upon to almost any extent.” (A Berlin Diary)
• "The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No." (The Nowaks)
• "All day long he made his rounds of the tenements in the district, collecting fifty pfennigs here, a mark there, scratching up his precarious livelihood, like a hen, from this apparently barren soil." (The Nowaks)
• "If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be an omnibus." (A Berlin Diary)

The Sally Bowles section of this book formed the basis for the brilliant must-see musical Cabaret.

September 2022; 256 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Blackout" by Simon Scarrow

 A serial killer is at lose in Berlin in the middle of a snow-bound December in 1939, as the Nazi party tightens its grip on power. Inspector Horst Schenke of the Kriminal Polizei is assigned the case by a senior Gestapo official: does the Party have something to hide? And what is the involvement of the Abwehr, the MI6 of the Reich?

A classic murder mystery with plenty of thriller action and a wonderfully literal Gestapo officer who reminded me of Jasper de Zoet in Utopia Avenue.

Selected quotes:

• "The boughs of the trees were laden with ice and snow, c learly visible against the night sky, so that Schenke was reminded of a photographic negative, as if the world was the opposite of what it should be." (Ch 5)
• "It's like the country has been taken over by the kind of people who underperformed at school, and refused to read anything other than the headlines of the gutter press." (Ch 16)
• "He was reminded of the secretive Christian sects in Roman times who lived under the shadow of the crosses onto which those who were discovered were nailed and left to die." (Ch 25)
• "What, then, was the point of being a policeman when criminals ruled?" (Ch 25)

April 2022; 418 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Berlin" by Antony Beevor

This book recounts the final months of the Nazi regime. It starts in January 1945 when the Soviet forces invade Eastern Prussia and cross the Vistula to liberate the rest of Poland. It finishes when Berlin is captured and the Germans surrender.

It is compelling reading. Although I found it very difficult to keep track of which army was attacking where and who was defending against whom (and the maps at the front are frankly inadequate) one cannot miss the broad sweep of the narrative. Using individual and eye-witness accounts, Beevor touches the human horror of war and then multiplies it into an utterly shocking yet believable narrative. This we go from individual accounts of gang rape into the realisation that a staggering 100,000 German women are estimated to have been exposed to these awful experiences. He describes the confusion of troops attacking through forests and he emphasises the futility of sending scarcely pubescent boys into battle. There are scenes of hell as mis-thrown grenades blow a feet off and moments of utter weariness as shell-shocked and exhausted soldiers stumble through mud, falling in front of and being crushed by tanks. There are scarcely credible accounts of women queuing for water: when a shell kills some the others just close ranks a little closer to the front of the queue. There are also moments of pathos: the eighteen year old broadcaster announcing that the Fuhrer is dead in the last broadcast before the aerial is destroyed and others who tried to continue with normal life as bombs exploded around them.

Why did the Nazis fight on? They were massively outnumbered by an a]enemy whose equipment and supplies were better in every way. Often they had insufficient ammunition. They threw into the battle inexperienced and unfit soldiers, often armed with antiquated and useless weapons. They must have known that they were going to lose. At then end they were fighting from building to building and they were dying for no purpose. Why did they not surrender sooner?

Beevor believes that the Battle for Berlin reveals "the incompetence, the frenzied refusal to accept reality and the inhumanity of the Nazi regime." It is difficult to insert a cigarette paper between the inhumanity of Hitler and that of Stalin but these inhumanities often went right down the line to each general who attacked when he knew he would lose many, many men. What doomed the Nazis was probably their incompetence. It seems difficult to brand a regime that ran Germany so successfully for five peaceful years as incompetent but it is difficult to understand how any system that deliberately set up duplicate bureaucracies so that they could compete with one another can possibly be competent. The leadership fought one another at every opportunity, even while hiding in a bunker.

The Nazis were massively inefficient in almost every way. They were especially wasteful of human talent. But they never had anything like the resource potential of the USSR. Invading Soviet Russia and declaring war on the USA were mistakes born of monstrous vanity. And Beevor suggests that the tragedy of fighting to the bitter end had its genesis in Hitler's  own vanity. He had no future after the war and he refused to consider the possibility that other people might be better off without him. He delayed his suicide until Berlin was destroyed and Germany devastated.

The Nazi leadership would have been laughable if they had not been so wicked and if they had not caused so much suffering to so many people.

One of the refreshing things about Beevor's book is how he is able to step aside from the faux objectivity of the scholarly historian and condemn wickedness and stupidity when it occurs. He highlights the moral deficiencies of the Nazi regime and many of those who followed them, even if they claimed to be ordinary soldiers or civilians following orders. "The Third Reich, in its death throes, revealed its frenzied rage against both common sense and common humanity."

This is a terrible tale in many ways. At the same time it makes gripping reading. Beevor's narrative, though confusing at times, has moments of genius. In the end it reassures. The Third Reich could not have survived because hatred is doomed to destroy itself. To build you need cooperation, you need to share, and you need trust.

Harrowing but brilliant. September 2013; 431 pages.

Books about war in this blog can be found on this page.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God