Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin

Christopher Isherwood was born in Cheshire in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed Hitlers

rise to power first hand and some of his best works, such as Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on these experiences. Isherwood travelled with W.H. Auden to

China in the late 1930s before going to America in 1939 which he made his home for the rest of his life. He died on 4 January 1986.

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

All the Conspirators

The Memorial

Lions and Shadows

Prater Violet

The Condor and the Cows

The World in the Evening

Down There on a Visit

Ramakrishna and His Disciples

A Meeting by the River

Kathleen and Frank

Christopher and His Kind

My Guru and His Disciple

Exhumations

Mr Norris Changes Trains

A Single Man

With Don Bachardy

October

With W. H. Auden

The Dog Beneath the Skin

The Ascent of F6

On the Frontier

Journey to a War

The six pieces contained in this volume form a roughly continuous narrative. They are the only existing fragments of what was originally planned as a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin. I had intended to call it The Lost. My old title has been changed, however; it is too grandiose for this short loosely connected sequence of diaries and sketches.

Readers of Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in the United States as The Last of Mr Norris) may notice that certain characters and situations in that novel overlap and contradict what I have written here Sally Bowles, for instance, would have run into Mr Norris on Frl. Schroeders staircase; Christopher Isherwood would certainly have come home one evening to find William Bradshaw asleep in his bed. The explanation is simple: The adventures of Mr Norris once formed part of The Lost itself.

Because I have given my own name to the I of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libellously exact portraits of living persons. Christopher Isherwood is a convenient ventriloquists dummy, nothing more.

The first Berlin Diary, The Nowaks, and The Landauers have already appeared, in John Lehmanns New Writing. Of these, Berlin Diary and The Nowaks and also the second Berlin Diary have appeared in his Penguin New Writing. Sally Bowles was originally published as a separate volume by The Hogarth Press.

C.I.

September 1935

TO JOHN AND BEATRIX LEHMANN

FROM MY WINDOW, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied faades, 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.

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.

At eight oclock in the evening the house-doors will be locked. The children are having supper. The shops are shut. The electric sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour. And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad. Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make quite sure that it is not as I know very well it could not possibly be for me.

The extraordinary smell in this room when the stove is lighted and the window shut; not altogether unpleasant, a mixture of incense and stale buns. The tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar. The washstand like a Gothic shrine. The cupboard also is Gothic, with carved cathedral windows: Bismarck faces the King of Prussia in stained glass. My best chair would do for a bishops throne. In the corner, three sham medieval halberds (from a theatrical touring company?) are fastened together to form a hatstand. Frl. Schroeder unscrews the heads of the halberds and polishes them from time to time. They are heavy and sharp enough to kill.

Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp. Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a phalanx of metal objects a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray from which emerges the head of a crocodile, a paperknife copied from a Florentine dagger, a brass dolphin holding on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years: people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for munitions in a war. Every morning, Frl. Schroeder arranges them very carefully in certain unvarying positions: there they stand, like an uncompromising statement of her views on Capital and Society, Religion and Sex.

All day long she goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her lodgers.

She has dark, bright, inquisitive eyes and pretty waved brown hair of which she is proud. She must be about fifty-five years old.

Long ago, before the War and the Inflation, she used to be comparatively well off. She went to the Baltic for her summer holidays and kept a maid to do the housework. For the last thirty years she has lived here and taken in lodgers. She started doing it because she liked to have company.

Lina, my friends used to say to me, however can you? How can you bear to have strange people living in your rooms and spoiling your furniture, especially when youve got the money to be independent? And Id always give them the same answer. My lodgers arent lodgers, I used to say. Theyre my guests.

You see, Herr Issyvoo, in those days I could afford to be very particular about the sort of people who came to live here. I could pick and choose. I only took them really well connected and well educated proper gentlefolk (like yourself, Herr Issyvoo). I had a Freiherr once, and a Rittmeister and a Professor. They often gave me presents a bottle of cognac or a box of chocolates or some flowers. And when one of them went away for his holidays hed always send me a card from London, it might be, or Paris, or Baden-Baden. Ever such pretty cards I used to get...

And now Frl. Schroeder 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. As in so many of the older Berlin flats, our living-room connects the front part of the house with the back. The lodgers who live on the front have to pass through the living-room on their way to the bathroom, so that Frl. Schroeder is often disturbed during the night. But I drop off again at once. It doesnt worry me. Im much too tired. She has to do all the housework herself and it takes up most of her day. Twenty years ago, if anybody had told me to scrub my own floors, Id have slapped his face for him. But you get used to it. You can get used to anything. Why, I remember the time when Id sooner cut off my right hand than empty this chamber... And now, says Frl. Schroeder, suiting the action to the word, my goodness! Its no more to me than pouring out a cup of tea!