The first section of this book is called “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930)”; the last is “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1932-3).” Between lie four narrative pieces, tranches de vie with hardly enough plot for the name “short story,” but with too much depth to be called sketches, although that is the word Mr. Isherwood himself uses for them in his brief and modest preface, in which he tells us that the pieces in this book, as well as his previous novel, The Last of Mr Norris, were originally planned as part of a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin. That was to have been called “The Lost”; but the author says he found that title too grandiose for this book.

It is nevertheless an illuminating title to bear in mind as one reads Goodbye to Berlin. Here one sees, set down with a perfection of observation which makes analysis unnecessary, the psychological atmosphere which made Hitlerism possible; the author's fellow-lodgers are of the expropriated, drifting petty bourgeoisie held by a state of mind hardly positive enough to be called despair; but among the pupils to whom he taught English one catches glimpses of the terrified rich, barricading themselves in the fashionable, cheerless suburbs behind defenses of barbed wire and police dogs. Spiritually, he shows us, the people he knew lived in a kind of coma; they were not filled with resentment or rebellion: and just because they were a vacuum the flood of Nazism was able to take possession of them. And, running like an accompaniment all through the book, is the theme of homosexuality, not merely the advertised, painted boys of the notorious brothels, but the more poisonous homosexuality that is comradeship and masculinity gone wrong.

Mr. Isherwood combines an uncanny accuracy of observation and ability to convey his impressions with a universal sympathy almost unknown in English literature. He does not condemn the painted boys; he presents them. He does not condemn the brutal Storm Troopers who begin to appear in the last diary; he presents them, and leaves the reader to judge if he will. One feels that this impartial sensitivity has in it a certain defect of its own; the book leaves one with the feeling that Mr. Isherwood merely let impressions come to him; one cannot help wishing that he had looked for more shades of opinion and character, had tried to find somewhere the surviving idealism of the Weimar Republic, or Leftists more intelligent than his emotional Communists. Perhaps that will yet be corrected in that huge episodic novel.