Character is arguably the most important single component of the novel. Other forms (such as epic) and other media (such as film) can tell a story just as well, but nothing can equal the great tradition of the European novel in the richness, variety and psychological depth of its portrayal of human nature. Yet character is probably the most difficult aspect of the art of fiction to discuss in technical terms.

Christopher Isherwood's Sally Bowles, originally the subject of one of the lightly fictionalized stories and sketches that make up Goodbye to Berlin, is a character who has enjoyed a remarkably long life in the public imagination, thanks to the successful adaptation of the text as a stage play and film (I Am a Camera), then as a stage and film musical (Cabaret). At first glance, it's hard to understand why she should have achieved this almost mythical status. She is not particularly beautiful, not particularly intelligent, and not particularly gifted as an artiste. She is vain and feckless. But she retains an endearing air of innocence and vulnerability in spite of it all, and there is something irresistibly comic about the gap between her pretensions and the facts of her life. Her story gains enormously in interest and significance from being set in Weimar Berlin, just before the Nazi takeover. Dreaming of fame and riches in seedy lodging houses, bouncing from one louche protector to another, flattering, exploiting and lying in the most transparent fashion, she is an emblem of the self-deception and folly of that doomed society.

The simplest way to introduce a character is to give a physical description and biographical summary, but that method arrests the flow of the narrative and risks swamping the reader with too much information. Modern novelists usually prefer to let the facts emerge gradually, through action and speech. In any case, all description in fiction is highly selective; its basic technique is synecdoche, the part standing for the whole.

Clothes are always a useful index of character, class and life style, but especially in the case of an exhibitionist like Sally. Her black silk get-up, worn for a casual afternoon visit, signals desire-to-impress, theatricality (the cape), and sexual provocativeness (the page-boy's hat with its connotations of the sexual ambivalence that pervades the book). These traits are immediately reinforced by her speech and behavior—asking to use the telephone in order to impress the two men with her latest erotic conquest—which then gives the narrator the opportunity for a description of Sally's hands and face.

This is what Henry James meant by the “scenic method,” what he aimed to achieve when he exhorted himself to “Dramatize! Dramatize!” James was thinking of the stage, but Isherwood belonged to the first generation of novelists to grow up with the cinema. When the narrator of Goodbye to Berlin says “I am a camera,” he is thinking of a movie camera. It is easy to break down this passage into a sequence of “shots”: Sally posing in her black silk outfit—a quick exchange of glances between the two men—a close-up of Sally's green fingernails as she dials the number—another close-up of her makeup and affected expression as she greets her lover—and a two-shot of the male spectators, riveted by the sheer ham of the performance.

This may explain the ease with which Sally Bowles's story has transferred to the screen. But there are nuances in the passage which are purely literary. You could show the green nail polish, but not the narrator's ironic comment: “a color unfortunately chosen.” “Unfortunately chosen” is the story of Sally's life. And you could show the nicotine stains and the dirt, but only a narrator could observe: “dirty as a little girl's.” The childlike quality beneath the surface sophistication is precisely what makes Sally Bowles a memorable character.

Kay Ferres (excerpt date 1994)

[In the following excerpt, Ferres provides a history of the composition and publication of Goodbye to Berlin and discusses the chronology of the stories.]

Mr. Norris Changes Trains was written rather rapidly after Isherwood and Heinz had left Berlin, during their stay at Tenerife. It was published at the Hogarth Press. The other elements of The Lost were written and published at different times during this unsettled exile. In the course of the composition of the various episodes that make up Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood was also occupied with the dramatic collaborations with W. H. Auden, and wrote several screenplays with Berthold Viertel. Traces of these experiences are evident in Goodbye to Berlin, but the novel itself is also, in part, the product of an important collaboration with John Lehmann in the publication of New Writing. Both Lehmann's and Isherwood's accounts of the history of this collaboration locate New Writing as a break with modernism (of the Hogarth Press, in particular), and as a vehicle for the concerns of their own generation. In Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood recalls his first meeting with Lehmann:

What Christopher didn't, couldn't have realized was that this personage contained two beings whose deepest interests were in conflict: an editor and a poet. John the Editor was also in conflict with the policy of Hogarth Press. For he was destined to become the great literary obstetrician of his own age, to bring the writing of the thirties to birth and to introduce it to the world.¹

Isherwood felt most in sympathy with John the Poet, finding John the Editor a rather comic figure, but their relationship and the manifesto of New Writing together were responsible for bringing much of Goodbye to Berlin to birth. Lehmann's journal provided the perfect space for “The Nowaks,” “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930),” and “The Landauers.” In Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir, Lehmann remembers their discussions in Amsterdam in July 1935:

The main idea was that it should be the magazine to publish the writings of our generation and its sympathizers, i.e. the contributors who had appeared in New Signatures and New Country, but should also be international. I was convinced that in many countries of Europe there were new writers who felt just as we felt about the rising tide of fascism … and had a similar desire to bridge the gulf between the well-educated middle classes and the still less articulate, less privileged working classes. … But I wanted to avoid writing whose whole point was to prove a political moral, such as was already appearing in Left Review. Christopher agreed with me wholeheartedly about this: it was a new imaginative literature we wanted to find. We also agreed that our magazine should provide a place for those long short stories … which were often published on the Continent but were at the same time too short for English publishers of novels.²

In London, Lehmann negotiated a contract with The Bodley Head, and by November Isherwood had completed “The Nowaks” for inclusion in New Writing No. 1, which was sent to him in Sintra, Portugal. As well as contributing himself, he solicited contributions for other issues from Auden and Edward Upward. In the meantime, Isherwood completed another section of The Lost, Sally Bowles, which he described in a letter to Lehmann as “an attempt to satirize the romance-of-prostitution racket. Good heter stuff,”³ but unsuited to the serious tone of New Writing. Lehmann's concern, apart from the story's length, was with possible censorship of the abortion episode, but Isherwood insisted that without it, Sally would appear “a silly little capricious bitch.” Finally, displaying what Lehmann calls “considerable courage,” Leonard and Virginia Woolf published it as a separate little book.⁴ Isherwood's association with New Writing continued, and his relationship with Lehmann provided an important contact with England, as well as an anchor to his work, during the period of personal and political uncertainty from 1935 to 1938.

The philosophy of New Writing, and the views of the writer's responsibility to both art and politics which Isherwood and Lehmann shared, provided the basis of a collaboration which might be compared to his collaboration with Edward Upward on the Mortmere fantasies. The earlier relationship had provided a private space for the expression of youthful rage and rebellion in the genre of the repressed, the Gothic. Later, New Writing provided a public space for a maturer political reflection on contemporary Europe. Although Isherwood's writing concentrates on Berlin, Lehmann and Spender were writing about Vienna, and Auden and others about Spain. New Writing not only allowed these ideas expression, but shaped that expression to a considerable extent, at least in Isherwood's case. His first letter to Lehmann refers to “a novel written in diary form and semi-political”;⁵New Writing replaced the diary as the imperative for documenting the Berlin experience in “The Nowaks,” “The Landauers,” and “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930).” To these episodes, Sally Bowles, “On Ruegen Island,” and the final diary of Winter 1932-1933 were added, completing the personal, political, and cultural history of Weimar Berlin.

The history of the composition and publication of Goodbye to Berlin, the episodic nature of the narrative, and Isherwood's own references to the “fragments” which comprise it have contributed to the critical reception of the book as a collection of loosely connected short stories. The “connections” among the stories are generally seen in terms of cinematic techniques, giving rise to a conception of the novel as a series of photographically recorded episodes whose coherence is imposed sequentially and contingently. Valentine Cunningham comments on the structure of the novel in this way, as a significant juxtaposition:

And though the Berlin shots, as it were, are taken randomly there's nothing indiscriminate about the final juxtaposition of the image: the juxtaposing of ordinary lives or reckless careers against the mounting brutalities of the Nazis makes a tellingly radical critique of the politically innocent, romantic or careless.⁶

While the structurally imposed sequentiality of the episodes and the framing of them by the diaries certainly foregrounds the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the brutal, the episodic nature of the narrative opens up a series of positions from which both the “camera-narrator” and the reader can construct meanings from the text. And critical commentary sometimes loses sight of the fact that this is a literary text, and that the history of its production suggests that its episodic or fragmentary nature might be read against the discontinuities of modernism and the structures of the drama, as well as cinematic technique. Nevertheless, the opening statement of the Berlin Diary has rightly focused critical attention:

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 o'clock in the evening the house-doors will be locked … 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.⁷

If the statement “I am a camera” is naively taken as a description of Isherwood's narrative position, the conclusion generally follows that the narrator is a dispassionate observer, an onlooker who records events but makes no comment on them. Norman Friedman accepts the statement as a description of a method which is “the ultimate in authorial exclusion,” and condemns the technique whose purpose, as he sees it, is simply “to transmit, without apparent selection or management, a ‘slice of life.’”⁸ Indeed, Friedman sees Isherwood's fiction as the paradigmatic example of documentary, and therefore, non-literary, writing. This analysis of “point of view,” however, proceeds from an unsophisticated notion of the camera's construction of reading positions for the viewer of the cinematic text; indeed, from a notion of interpretation which accords the reader only a passive role in the construction of meaning. In fact, the “passive” camera is remarkably active in this passage, directing the reader's voyeuristic gaze to the private rituals of the bathroom and bedroom, and constructing a poignant vignette of sexual assignation. And the “camera-narrator” is not contained by the mechanistic metaphor, as he humanly responds to the whistling from the street below.

The narrative function of these opening paragraphs, then, is to situate both narrator and reader as actively constructing meaning. The “camera-narrator's” disavowal of this active role is only partial, qualified as it is by the reference to a future role as film editor. But that role is not appropriated, and is therefore available to be appropriated by the reader. The second paragraph extends the intimacy of the first by enticing the reader to the window with the narrator; where in the first paragraph the voyeuristic gaze did not fix on its object, now both narrator and reader “peep through the slats.” They are associated in their unfulfilled desire, as they are associated in their otherness. The narrative which follows traces the narrator's (and the reader's) desire to displace that otherness, beginning in the private domain of the boardinghouse and in the company of other expatriates—in Sally Bowles and “On Ruegen Island”—before transgressing the boundaries of class, nationality, and politics—in “The Nowaks” and “The Landauers.”

The opening Berlin Diary situates the narrator as outsider, but with a privileged intimacy, a position Peter Gay identifies as symptomatic of Weimar culture.⁹ The description of the boarding house, its furnishings, and its owner reads as social history:

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 bishop's throne. … 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. …

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.¹⁰

This reading of Fraulein Schroeder and her flat also reveals the knowledge which the narrator deploys in constructing the meaning of German culture. His knowledge draw upon the discourses of socialism and sexology, and they have to work upon the distinctively German inflections of the discourses of Romanticism and Nationalism. These intersecting discourses impose the grid by which the foreign social and political culture may be understood.

The Berlin Diaries which frame the narrative document the failure of socialism and the rise of Nazism, both by their presentation of public political events and the politicization of private hostilities. Because the other narratives within the frame are not chronologically linear, the diaries also serve to record the passing of time and to measure the political shifts in both public events and private attitudes which take place. In the first diary, for example, anti-Jewish feeling is manifested on a one-to-one basis, as a corollary of pro-Nazi sentiments:

In the flat directly beneath ours lives a certain Frau Glanterneck. She is a Galacian Jewess, in itself a reason why Frl. Mayr should be her enemy: for Frl. Mayr, needless to say, is an ardent Nazi. And, quite apart from this, it seems that Frau Glanterneck and Frl. Mayr once had words on the stairs about Frl. Mayr's yodelling. Frau Glanterneck, perhaps because she is a non-Aryan, said that she preferred the noises made by cats. Thereby, she insulted not merely Frl. Mayr, but all Bavarian, all German women: and it was Frl. Mayr's pleasant duty to avenge them.¹¹

So Nazi ideology legitimizes a grudge on the domestic level. The final diary shows how propaganda exploits such feelings to the point where street violence meets with no dissent, and indeed the tacit approval of the police:

In a moment they had jostled him into the shadow of a house entrance, and were standing over him, kicking and stabbing at him with the sharp metal points of their banners. … He lay huddled crookedly in the corner, like an abandoned sack. As they picked him up, I got a sickening glimpse of his face—his left eye was poked half out, and blood poured from the wound. … By this time dozens of people were looking on. They seemed surprised, but not particularly shocked—this sort of thing happened all too often, nowadays. “Allerhand …” they murmured. Twenty yards away, at the Potsdamerstrasse corner, stood a group of heavily armed policemen. With their chests out, and their hands on their revolver belts, they magnificently disregarded the whole affair.¹²

The intervening episodes examine social and economic conditions and the psychological predispositions which Nazi propaganda is able to work upon: the staged quarrels of the boys at the Alexander Casino, Frau Nowak's (and the other inmates') eager submission to authority at the sanitarium, and the easy gullibility of the audience at the wrestling. The basis of the significant juxtaposition—of public and private—is also the basis of the narrator's implicit judgment of political events: the recognition, as in Mr. Norris, of the importance of the relation of the personal and the political.

While the diaries provide a space for the narrator to observe and comment upon political events, the intervening narratives involve him in important relationship which call into question the adequacy of a wholly intellectual response. In the context of these relationships, it is not only the adequacy of Christopher's political analysis, but also his moral character, which is subject to scrutiny.

The first prolonged relationship Christopher enters into is with Sally Bowles, an English cabaret singer and would-be actress who moves in the sub-culture of the night clubs and the itinerant. At this stage, as a foreigner, Christopher is tempering the exotic and the familiar. Sally is recognizably one of Berlin's “civil monsters,” but she is also reassuringly English. The portrait of Sally foregrounds both her superficiality and her vulnerability:

I noticed how old her hands looked in the lamplight. They were nervous, veined and very thin—the hands of a middle-aged woman. The green fingernails seemed not to belong to them at all; to have settled on them by chance—like hard, bright ugly little beetles.¹³

In his relationship with her, Christopher takes his cue from Sally's veneer of sophistication, reducing their conversations to shallow exchanges. His detachment is indicative both of his own character and of his relationship as narrator to the object of his narration. Sally is, to some extent, grist to his mill, but the management of the relationship seems to be mainly directed at exposing Christopher's personal limitations. Certainly Isherwood's own relationship with Sally's model, Jean Ross, and his concern that Sally should appear “silly and capricious” if the abortion scene were excised, suggests that Christopher's detachment is being represented as morally dangerous. His involvement in Sally's exploitation of the rich (and consenting) American, Clive, brings Christopher's first realization of the dangers inherent in his detachment. Significantly, this occurs as he is once again looking down on the streets, this time observing, with Sally and Clive, the funeral of Hermann Muller. It is Sally, diverting their attention to the sunset, who materializes their collective apathy:

She was quite right. We had nothing to do with those Germans down there, marching, or with the dead man in the coffin, or with the words on the banners. In a few days, I thought, we shall have forfeited kinship with ninety-nine percent 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.¹⁴

Christopher explicitly realizes the moral and social implications of his planned escapade with Clive and Sally: “Escape, in these terms, will bring damned isolation.”¹⁵ Clive's precipitate departure prevents the necessity of Christopher having to make the choice. His fate will not be to emulate Arthur Norris, but the comfortable domestic foreignness to which he has become accustomed is no longer viable either. Sally is the agent of a further reorientation of Christopher's position when, after her abortion and his holiday on Ruegen Island, she asks him to write a story about “The English Girl.” The result does not suit her purposes, and she identifies its failure as Christopher's separation of Art and Life. Christopher reacts to her criticism with shame and anger: “My literary self-conceit was proof against anything she could say—it was her criticism of myself. … I only knew that I'd been somehow made to feel a sham.”¹⁶

Sally Bowles problematizes the position of the foreigner, particularly the foreign political writer, in Berlin in the thirties. Sally, it could be argued, both in her life and her art—cabaret—engages more fully and more dangerously in a critique of Weimar culture. In the abortion episode, Sally is situated as the New Woman: sexually emancipated and self-determining. She chooses not to tell her lover, Klaus, of her pregnancy, and with the help of Fraulein Schroeder, finds an abortionist. It has been estimated that in Weimar Germany, in 1931, up to one million abortions were performed annually, with about 10,000 to 12,000 fatalities.¹⁷ The circumstances of Sally's abortion offer a comment on the contradictions of a society which, while capitalizing on the “liberation” of sexuality (especially female sexuality) consequent upon the emergence of sex reform movements, at the same time does not frame its politics of reproduction in terms of women's rights to self-determination. The doctor who “paws Sally's hand” before accepting the large fee which “dispel[s] the last whiff of sinister illegality” is able to operate because of this contradiction in the discourses of sexology and reform. The New Woman was constructed as both orgasmic and moral: this new-found sexual pleasure was to be realized in marriage. But this construction could prove confusing: as Atina Grossmann observes, the New Woman “presented herself in such a manner that it sometimes became difficult to distinguish the “honest women” from the “whores.”¹⁸ This is precisely the source of Sally's anxiety: she realizes that men like Clive take her for a whore, and she is not sure they are wrong. The abortion episode functions not sentimentally to “make an honest woman” of Sally, but to represent the contradictory nature of the construction of the New Woman. In this way Sally's portrait can be read alongside that of Helen Pratt in Mr. Norris, as a product of the shifting sexual politics of the thirties.

Christopher has engaged vicariously and moralistically with Berlin life through Sally, but this is not a relationship which has altered the contours of his understanding of himself. She is qualified to expose him as a sham, because of the level of her own self-understanding: Sally knows that she is a sham, but her experience of that condition has caused her hurt and loss. Christopher, on the other hand, seems to her to be protected from the reality which daily assaults her, and to feel superior because of it. It is not until Christopher enters into the lives of the Berliners, and takes similar risks, that his self-understanding is radically altered.

After Sally's abortion, and before her criticism of him, Christopher takes a holiday on Ruegen Island. Here he meets a young Englishman rather like himself, Peter Wilkinson, and Peter's friend, Otto Nowak. Peter and Otto's relationship reproduces the English fascination with working class boys, so typical of homosexual representations of the period. When Christopher meets them, that relationship has begun to deteriorate, and violent scenes erupt in the otherwise distanced third-person narrative. The narrative analysis of the relationship shows the influence of the psychological theories of Homer Lane: Peter, the restrained, upper middle class Englishman, is “all head,” ruled by his anxieties and inhibitions. Working class Otto is essentially physical, and “naturally” promiscuous because he responds wholeheartedly to his physical urges. Christopher romantically holds to the theory that repressed sexuality is responsible for anxiety and neurosis, and so approves of Otto's open expression of his true nature. Nevertheless, when Christopher replaces Peter in relationship to Otto, he inescapably reproduces Peter's introversion and intellectualism. Where the dynamics of the relationships vary, it is as a consequence of the relocation to the Nowaks' crowded tenement flat.

Although “On Ruegen Island” functions chiefly as a “scientific” analysis of cross-cultural and cross-class homosexuality, it does not leave political events behind in Berlin. These episodes take place in the Summer of 1931, just before the closure of the Darmstaedter und National. The holiday atmosphere on the island retrospectively takes on a sinister tone. German families throw themselves energetically into a regimen of physical exercise, an index of the effect of the Nazi's “Strength through Joy” indoctrination. The concern with health and strength is clearly marked by the eugenicist remarks of a Nazi doctor, who acts as an interpreter of social behavior. His deployment of “scientific” discourse would see Otto consigned to the labor camps: “He has a criminal head!” He opposes his “scientific” understanding of the working class to Christopher's “idealism,” and dismisses communism as “a mental disease”:

Five years ago I used to think as you do. But my work at the clinic has convinced me that communism is a mere hallucination. What people need is discipline, self-control. I can tell you this as a doctor. I know it from my own experience.¹⁹

“On Ruegen Island” brings into play the conflicting discourses of science: on the one hand eugenics and associated evolutionary theories, which legitimize repression and regulation, and on the other, psychoanalytic theory and socialism, which are mobilized against repression, whether individual or class-based. Thus the narrative situates Christopher's experiment with the working classes: his relationship with Otto and the Nowaks. Before he relocates himself physically in the Nowaks' flat, however, he has also to distance himself from both Peter and Sally, and to move to a position where his political and professional complacency is challenged. This is the function of Sally's denunciation.

The Nowaks' flat, and its environs, are positioned in a different political field to Fraulein Schroeder's boarding house: here the iconography of political antagonism takes the form of crudely daubed graffiti, but the motif of sharp weaponry reappears:

The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep, shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woolen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth. At the end of it, like a tall, dangerously sharp, red instrument, stood a church.²⁰

The Wassertorstrasse is a microcosm of the political and social institutions of Berlin, and the Nowaks represent the Berliners who are most at risk. They are like the children in the hopping game, teetering precariously on one side or other of arbitrarily drawn lines. The Nowaks subsist in appalling poverty in the attic of a slum tenement, with no plumbing, a leaking roof, broken stairs and windows. The family is already politically divided. The tubercular Frau Nowak looks back nostalgically, and with self-confessed political ignorance, to the days of the Kaiser. By contrast, Herr Nowak's reminiscences reveal his egalitarian values and his tendency to pacifism. The eldest son, Lothar, is an ardent Nazi, while Otto, nominally, is a communist. Like Lothar he is unemployed, but makes a living from prostitution while Lothar survives by doing odd jobs.

The tensions of six people living in such cramped conditions, in two rooms, are never well concealed. Violent and exaggerated reactions are normal in any conversational exchange. The family situation exhibits the same fragmentation as the society at large, where factional street fighting breaks out at the slightest provocation. With the removal of Frau Nowak to the sanitarium, the family structure collapses. The surrealistic description of the sanitarium with its diseased inmates cheerfully submitting to institutional authority invests these scenes with a terrifying significance, a portent of things to come. Back at the flat, Herr Nowak and Grete retreat into childish games: they are so utterly fascinated by Christopher's gift of a mechanical mouse that they do not notice his departure.

“The Nowaks” removes Christopher from his position as detached observer, sitting at the window, and replaces him at the center of a society which seems impelled to self destruction. His “parlour socialism,” exposed to the reality of a working-class slum, is found wanting:

Slowly but surely the Nowaks were breaking down my powers of resistance. Every day I found the smell from the kitchen sink a little nastier: every day Otto's voice when quarrelling seemed harsher and his mother's a little shriller. Grete's whine made me set my teeth. When Otto slammed a door I winced irritably. At nights I couldn't get to sleep unless I was half drunk. Also, I was secretly worrying about an unpleasant and mysterious rash: it might be due to Frau Nowak's cooking, or worse.²¹

Considering that Christopher had come to the Nowaks looking for “a quiet, clean room,” this response is hardly surprising. As Bernard Landauer says, Christopher's view of the working class is “romantic.” His socialist sympathies are grounded in his rebellion against his own class, and perhaps in the libertarian views of the utopian socialists, rather than on any understanding of the economic imperative informing socialist analysis.

Christopher's expectations of Otto, too, are not realized. His behavior, seen at this close range, has nothing to do with the expression of his true nature through sexuality, but is determined by an economic need to exploit every situation to his own advantage. Otto, like Sally Bowles, spends much of his time play acting, a proclivity which Christopher finds at first endearing, but finally irritating. The change in Christopher's attitude is evident in his impatient reaction to Otto's attempt at suicide. Although he had earlier been sympathetic to Otto's premonitory visions of the black hand, his impatience now suggests that his knowledge of the reality of Otto's lived experience has not sensitized him to the possible outcomes of that experience. Otto had represented a romantic ideal, and Christopher's disillusionment cannot yet accommodate the reality of Otto's existence.

Christopher's final relationship with Berliners is with the Jews, Bernard and Natalia Landauer. He enters into this relationship, initially, as a political response to the anti-Semitism of Fraulein Mayr. The Landauers are cultured, intellectual, and personable, if a little restrained. They, as representatives of the race whose destruction is justified by the science of eugenics, stand in contrast to Otto and the “criminals” who are also endangered by this ideology. Natalia, particularly, with her beauty, talent, and gravity, as well as her capacity for joy and warmth, embodies some of the finest human qualities. Indeed, her capacity for happiness, for optimism, and for successful human relationships distinguishes her from the other characters. Christopher's final meeting with her takes place at a gathering of Jews at Bernhard's lake house. Faced with intensifying anti-Semitism and the knowledge that her family will be dispossessed, if not destroyed, she does not merely escape, but makes plans to marry and to study art in Paris.

This meeting with Natalia contrasts with Christopher's earlier meetings with her. Formality, stiffness of bearing and speech, had distinguished her then. Yet this formality is counteracted by her evident interest in Christopher, an interest indicated by the seriousness of her attention to his conversation. She takes him at face value as a writer and an intellectual, and denounces as insincerity his efforts to maintain a superficial politeness. But while she is prepared to treat him seriously, her sense of humor exposes his intellectual pretensions: after his pronouncements on the futility of conversation she greets him with animal noises.

Like Sally Bowles, Natalia is critical of Christopher's failure to connect life and art. She herself, faced with extinction, makes a commitment to art and to relationships, and she is affronted by Christopher's efforts to reduce such serious matters to play. When Christopher introduces Sally and Natalia, he realizes that they both have seen through him. But he must also anticipate Natalia's distaste for Sally's lack of decorum. He plays this game in order to destroy his and Natalia's growing intimacy, and in doing so proves that this was a precious relationship: with no one else has Christopher been given the power to hurt.

Except for Bernhard. And it is in this relationship that Christopher has to confront the consequences of his detachment. In Bernhard, Christopher confronts the character who is most like himself. Like Christopher, Bernhard adopts a position detached from politics and relationships. His confession—“I'm afraid I always was constitutionally incapable of bringing myself to the required pitch of enthusiasm”—arouses Christopher's anger and impatience, for he feels its sting. Bernhard deploys the same self-irony and gamesmanship as Christopher in maintaining his aloofness and distance.

Just as Christopher had reduced his relationships with Sally and Natalia to elaborate games, so Bernhard seems to enjoy manipulating him. Christopher does not recognize that, as in his own case, these are self-protective measures. Finally Bernhard issues a mysterious invitation, and at the house by the lake he speaks frankly of his family, their history, and of himself. His attempt at intimacy is rebuffed by Christopher, who is mistrustful and “a little shocked.” The failure of Bernhard's appeal is evident when Christopher insists that the “dazzlingly bright” lamps be extinguished. He will not reciprocate with any similar self revelation.

Things revert to what they were, but Bernhard makes one last appeal, after Christopher's stay with the Nowaks. This time the appeal is prefaced by an even more open revelation of Bernhard's despair:

Do you know, there are times when I sit here alone in the evenings, amongst these books and stone figures, and there comes to me such a strange sensation of unreality, as if this were my whole life? Yes, actually, sometimes, I have felt doubts as to whether our firm—that great building packed from floor to roof with all our accumulation of property—really exists at all, except in my imagination. … And then I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist.²²

Bernhard's existential despair is accompanied by a prescience of racial extermination that should strike a response from Christopher. But he turns away from Bernhard's proposition—a journey to Peking—and reverts to games. Perhaps Christopher is right to do so, for Bernhard is not looking for an escape, but a commitment. When news comes of Bernhard's death—a report overheard in conversation—the implications of Christopher's refusal are unmistakable. The Faustian vision of damned isolation in Sally Bowles is realized.

The final Berlin Diary turns back to the question of the writer as a political agent, to the connection of life and art. After the tightly controlled representation of the tragedy of Bernhard's death, the “camera” returns to the streets. The hysteria which has been latent or repressed previously now rises to the surface. Scenes of Nazi violence are reported directly from diary entries. The lucid perceptions of the narrator-witness testify to his fundamental intelligence and sympathy. Yet the ever-present awareness of the limitations of his personal and political positions mitigates the harshness of his own self-judgment:

I catch sight of myself in the mirror of the shop and am horrified to find I am smiling. You can't help smiling in such beautiful weather.²³

The reflection is not that of a “civil monster.” Christopher has moved from the window to another position in the streets. His self-construction has been the result of a process of attachment and separation. He has (mis)recognized himself in the reflection of others—of Sally, Peter, Otto, Natalia, and Bernhard. He has confronted his own limitations, and the limitations of the political positions he has adopted on trust. In these historical circumstances, those weaknesses are only too apparent. Yet in other times, and in the context of a different philosophy and culture, the positive aspects of his position might also emerge.

Christopher Isherwood's attention to the incidence of civil monsters in the variegated social spaces of Berlin makes way for an understanding of the public sphere as highly differentiated. His Berliners are identified across the lines of class, culture, and sexuality in ways that challenge nationalist definitions. While German cinema “was serving up nationalism to suit all tastes,” and exploiting the democratic appeal of film's transcendent language, Isherwood's camera records flickering, unstable images of class division, racial vilification, and political unrest. In the narrator's image, reflected by the glass of the shop window, we are given a metaphor of the cinema's narcissism. Art, whether filmic or poetic, is a medium whose political uses cannot be secured by the artist, who is just as susceptible to its seductive allure as the mass audience. Isherwood's narrator is scathing about the Ufa's seamless, escapist fantasies, and we are given instead a “flicker,” a documentary which mixes the real and surreal in the manner of cabaret. Isherwood's text enters a debate about the political uses of art which preoccupied the writers of the thirties.

Notes

1. Christopher and His Kind, p. 97.

2. John Lehmann. Christopher Isherwood: A Personal Memoir. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, p. 24-25.

3. Ibid., p. 27.

4. Ibid., p. 29.

5. Ibid., p. 9.

6. Valentine Cunningham. “Cabaret,” a review of The Berlin of Sally Bowles, in New Statesman and Nation 90 (1975): 229.

7. Christopher Isherwood. Goodbye to Berlin. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1945, p. 7.

8. Friedman, p. 1178-1179.

9. Peter Gay. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper and Row, 1968.

10. Goodbye to Berlin, p. 8.

11. Ibid., p. 16.

12. Ibid., p. 198.

13. Ibid., p. 34.

14. Ibid., p. 52.

15. David P. Thomas. “Goodbye to Berlin: Refocusing Isherwood's Camera,” in Contemporary Literature 13 (1972): 51.

16. Goodbye to Berlin, p. 67.

17. Atina Grossmann. “The New Woman and the Rationalization of Sexuality in Weimar Germany,” in Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. London: Virago Books, 1983, p. 193.

18. Grossmann, p. 193.

19. Goodbye to Berlin, p. 89.

20. Ibid., p. 103.

21. Ibid., p. 125.

22. Ibid., p. 77-78.

23. Ibid., p. 204.