The agonizing of the “Auden generation” over their support for leftish causes called forth a good deal of suspicion at the time, and George Orwell's description of the typical English bourgeois intellectual of the Thirties crystallizes this feeling:

It is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour—hardly even words.¹

While Christopher Isherwood's life in Berlin appeared to remove at least some of these disabilities, the confessional tone of his writings could also be seen, from the hostile viewpoint, to express a kind of political exhibitionism. Sympathy for the oppressed was one thing; wringing one's hands and proclaiming personal inadequacy was another. Cynicism about peripatetic liberals was also undoubtedly fired by the evident homosexual nature of some of their work. Orwell again, in his contempt for “nancy poets,” typified this reaction—with its suggestion that the class-rebellion of such writers contained elements of thrill-seeking. This is quite apart from the even more mindless attitudes towards homosexuality in any form.

What is clear is that criticism (in keeping with contemporary fashion) was directed first against the class “purity” and personal motivations of the writer and then against the ideological content of his work. “Literary values,” or worst of all, “sensibility,” were irrelevant and perhaps a kind of decadence.

But Isherwood is best approached precisely from this forbidden direction. It is really a matter of choosing to end rather than begin with politics. If Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin are read from the starting-point of their literary allegiances and not with a view of their political pedigree, they acquire a richer metaphorical texture and, finally, a deeper political meaning. It was fin de siécle romanticism, especially the ambience of Baudelaire, which gave Isherwood's Berlin stories their special quality and effectiveness. Furthermore, Isherwood's debt to this tradition, transformed by a contemporary homosexual sensibility, was in the context of the emergence of the Nazis of immediate political reference. By historical accident, perhaps, “Camp” provided a mode of specific political truth, and Isherwood was the brilliant chronicler of Berlin in the early Thirties because of literary and not strictly political loyalties.

Isherwood kept “a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories.”² He first intended

To transform this material into one huge tightly constructed melodramatic novel, in the manner of Balzac. I wanted to call it The Lost. This title, or rather its German equivalent, Die Verlorenen, seemed to me wonderfully ominous. I stretched it to mean not only The Astray and The Doomed—referring tragically to the political events in Germany and our epoch but also “The Lost” in quotation-marks—referring satirically to those individuals whom respectable society shuns in horror: an Arthur Norris, a von Pregnitz, a Sally Bowles.³

Elements of The Lost remain in the Berlin stories, and however ironic, Isherwood's conception of the “doomed” underworld carried with it hints of the familiar fin de siècle descent into the corrupt depths of the dreadful city. Soon after moving to Berlin, Isherwood had in fact published a translation of Baudelaire's Intimate Journals.⁴ But “The Lost” in quotation marks denotes a real change in quality. Arthur Norris, von Pregnitz, and Sally Bowles are not drawn from the abject gutter wherein Baudelaire discovered the perverse creative horror of la nausée. The tragic dimension of The Lost gave way to comic ambiguity in the first Berlin fiction Isherwood actually wrote.

Lions and Shadows (1938), Isherwood's only slightly fictionalized autobiography of the period from his last year at Repton School to his departure for Berlin in 1929 contains a good deal of material concerning his literary enthusiasms. It helps to explain the transformation of The Lost into the Berlin stories.

Isherwood was introduced to Baudelaire while on a holiday in France with Edward Upward (“Allen Chalmers”):

Chalmers told me, in bits of sentences and with silent ambiguous gestures toward the shore, how he had discovered Les Fleurs du Mal. … His suppressed excitement set me, as always, instantly on fire. We got back late, and I had to run through the streets to buy my first copy of Baudelaire before the book shops closed. Without it, that night, I should not have slept a wink.⁵

Baudelaire became the explicit basis of their shared fantasies about conspiring against middle-class society:

For Chalmers, thanks to Baudelaire, knew all about l'affreuse Juive, opium, absinthe, negresses, Lesbos and the metamorphoses of the vampire. Sexual love was the torture-chamber, the loathesome charnel-house, the bottomless-abyss. The one valid sexual pleasure was to be found in the consciousness of doing evil.⁶

This adolescent desire to break taboos of respectable society took essentially literary form. Upward and Isherwood created a number of fantasy figures and narratives which partly adopted and partly parodied the fin de siècle cult of the outré. Thus they invented “The Watcher in Spanish” as a kind of arch-spy, a “macabre but semi-comic figure, not unlike Guy Fawkes, or a human personification of Poe's Raven.”⁷ Baudelaire, Poe, the macabre, sexual grotesques—all became elements in the elaborate fantasy narratives about the town of Mortmere which Isherwood and Upward created together while in residence at Cambridge. While Isherwood devotes much space in Lions and Shadows to a consideration of the psychological implications of these fantasies, it is their literary mode I wish to stress here.⁸

Mortmere was situated on the Downs near the Atlantic. Its inhabitants were grotesque caricatures of “normal” English types, whose activities included most of the more ingenious sexual perversions. Some stories are summarized in Lions and Shadows. In one, the Reverend Welkin, Vicar of Mortmere, is convinced that his dead wife appears to him in the form of a succubus as punishment for certain moral offences committed with a choir boy. In another story, the squalid Gunball manages a hotel which is really a brothel for necrophiles. This parody of the self-consciously “sinful” sexuality and forbidden themes of romantic decadence ran alongside Isherwood's conception of himself as The Artist, disdainfully remote from the flux of common life:

Now that Isherwood The Artist had taken a vow of abstinence from the world (by which I meant, vaguely, that I should never again risk making a fool of myself socially, in public …) it became natural to think of him as being a kind of invalid. And indeed this invalid role was only too fatally attractive. Hadn't Kathy [Mansfield] and Emmy [Brontë] been invalids? Didn't Baudelaire die of a frightful disease?⁹

Indeed, disease became a mark of artistic integrity—in contrast to the rude philistine health of those Isherwood vaguely gathered together as The Enemy. Disease was also basic to the perverse journey of the decadent through putrification to purity, through corruption to grace.

But if Isherwood struck fin de siècle poses as an undergraduate, there were obvious reasons why the doomed artist needed revision.

Freud had substantially re-defined “disease”—at least in the “spiritual” sense most favored by adolescent romantics. Instead of the sinner (with all the fearful drama of damnation), he had substituted the neurotic. At the same time, Freud offered a “scientific” sanction for the affectation of disease on the part of the artist. In Lionel Trilling's words:

By means of belief in his own sickness, the artist may the more easily fulfill his chosen, and assigned, function of putting himself in connection with the forces of spirituality and morality; the artist sees as insane the “normal” and “healthy” ways of established society, while aberration and illness appear as spiritual and moral health if only because they confront the ways of respectable society.¹⁰

Isherwood's crucial encounter with psychoanalysis came at the instigation of W. H. Auden. Auden returned from Germany in the autumn of 1928 full of enthusiasm for the teachings of the American psychologist Homer Lane, to which he had been introduced by Lane's disciple John Layard. Lane's appeal to a Baudelairean imagination was very direct. “Sin” was defined as the failure to conform with one's desires:

The whole problem, when dealing with a patient, is to find out which of all the conflicting things inside him is God, and which is the Devil. And the one sure guide is that God always appears unreasonable, while the Devil appears always to be noble and right.¹¹

To seek “cure” through “sin” (which was God) in Lane's terms led Isherwood to Berlin. But what should be recognized about this “conversion” is that while a new jargon had been provided the structure of belief remained the same. Fin de siècle motifs were absorbed naturally by the new doctrine. The descent into the dreadful city, the search for salvation amongst the “lost” and the doomed, the inversion of conventional meanings of “health” and “sickness” were all now “therapy.” But the removal of sin by Freud diminished the Baudelairean drama. Neurotics, unlike the damned, were not tragic. “The Lost” acquired quotation marks.

Isherwood's first novel, All The Conspirators (1928), provides evidence of this Freudian view superimposed upon the fin de siècle machinery. Allen Chalmers, a medical student and friend of Philip Lindsay, the protagonist, suffers from “boredom which was like hunger or love”¹² and later concludes that “boredom belongs to the group of cancerous diseases.”¹³ This updating of ennui into modish psychosomatic terms does not, however, conceal the basis of Allen's pose. Explaining to Philip why he gets drunk, he declares his antecedents:

Boredom, usually. Then there's a certain atmosphere about it. Baudelaire. Poor Edgar, my namesake. Very childish. You don't approve of all that, of course. It's debased romanticism.¹⁴

Allen's role as physician is itself highly symbolic. For the doctor who acknowledges his own sickness is analogous to the artist who detaches himself from life in order that he may “treat” it. Allen's impulses are, in Philip's words, “always negative.”¹⁵ Such “debased romanticism” involves a perverse seeking out of disease (the physician's function) while recoiling from life in general as fundamentally sick. The physician-figure is a Freudian mask for la nausée. Philip detects the aesthete behind the “clinical” stance. “Health for Health's sake is just a parrot's cry of Art for Art's.”¹⁶

But changes in Isherwood's understanding of his own neuroticism altered his fin de siècle loyalties. Unable to write about the damned, he chose, in Mr. Norris Changes Trains, to write about the naughty. Baudelaire was replaced, albeit temporarily, by the narcissistic and more trivial side of Wilde. “Camp,” however, was by no means an alien mode to the emergent Germany.

.....

Though in wide current usage, “Camp” is a notoriously elusive term. Isherwood made an attempt at description if not definition through the character of Charles, the homosexual doctor in The World in the Evening (1954). Charles insists, furthermore, upon distinct classes of Camp:

High Camp is the emotional basis of the Ballet, for example, and of course of Baroque art. You see, true High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. Baroque art is largely camp about religion. The Ballet is camp about love. …¹⁷

Dostoevsky, Charles claims, is “the founder of the whole school of modern Psycho-Camp which was later developed by Freud.”¹⁸ If these statements are not pressed too hard, they do yield something. High Camp clearly values style above all else. Ballet, for instance, must rest on movement, elegance, form before content of ideas. Since High Camp is “about” something and extracts “fun” from its subject, it tends naturally to caricature and parody—though not satire (which makes heavy intellectual demands). Exaggeration is essential to High Camp, and therefore it is inimical to realism. It is also clear that High Camp values style before sincerity, artifice before “reality.”

While Camp, in whatever class, is normally associated with homosexuality—Charles notes transvestitism as the best known form of Low Camp—it is debatable whether this is a necessary relationship. The line between Aestheticism and Camp is often difficult to draw, though rigorous formalists, being entirely serious and resistant to distortion, do not “camp.” Thus Aubrey Beardsley is frequently taken as the high priest of Camp because his is an art which “makes fun out of” Art, while displaying great technical brilliance (quite aside from his demimondaine subject-matter).

The Isherwood-Upward Mortmere stories were Camp about fin de siècle Vice and Sin in an English setting. They delighted in parodying the doomed and damned, the outrè, and the masked criminal. But such parody (and the obsessive nature of these fantasies) testified to the underlying seriousness of Isherwood's commitment to that milieu.

Isherwood wrote two books about his Berlin experiences: Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1934) and Goodbye to Berlin (1938). The first is a novel and the latter a group of six related stories. There is a distinct progression from stylish comedy to high moral seriousness to be detected in this fiction, in which Isherwood's manipulation of fin de siècle motifs is of central importance.

In Mr. Norris Changes Trains, William Bradshaw, the narrator, meets Arthur Norris in the opening scene in a railway carriage en route to Berlin. This meeting proves to have its own literary flavor, for Bradshaw discovers later that Norris was a member of the Wildean Cafè Royal society. When Norris asserts, “I put my genius into my life, not into my art” (123), he is, of course, echoing Wilde. Much of what follows in the novel, and particularly Bradshaw's ambiguous attitude towards Norris, may be understood as stemming from Norris' special status as a living fin de siècle caricature. Arthur Norris is supremely Camp about the Lost, self-consciously living out the role of an aesthete in the underworld. It is the literary significance of Norris which absolves him from Bradshaw's moral strictures. He is judged by the standards of Art, not Life, for style and not truth.

Indeed, Bradshaw's inclination to exist in a decadent romantic fantasy is self-evident, though the Mortmere stories make plain Isherwood's pronounced habit of parody. The celebrated distance of the Isherwood narrator in the Berlin fiction is itself a parody of the aesthete's detachment from life.¹⁹ Arthur Norris is a highly convenient fantasy figure for Bradshaw: the Camp version of the corrupter of innocent youth (Wilde's Long Henry Wotton) and a means of escape into Art whenever Life makes too many demands. Bradshaw is “led” by Norris into the demimonde and yet insulated by this comic Svengali from any sense of moral reality. Thus the obligatory brothel scene becomes farce, in which Norris is discovered enjoying masochistic delights at the hands of two ladies, Anni and Olga, “dressed, lightly but with perfect decency, in a suit of mauve silk underwear, a rubber abdominal belt and a pair of socks” (30). Olga is a Camp Avenging Female, a comic form of the more sinister Loathly Ladies who recur throughout Isherwood's work as the focus of homosexual hostility.

There would at first appear to be a simple contrast between the Camp world of Norris and the “real” activities of “normal” Berliners. In one crucial scene, Bradshaw confesses his inadequacies and irresponsibility to Ludwig Bayer, the Communist Party chief, after an episode in which he had entered uncritically into one of Norris' schemes. The Party, indeed, functions as the Church does for the fin de siècle sinner. It purges and purifies and yet, like Catholicism in the 90s, it is itself outré. With Bradshaw's confession there seems to be an acknowledgment of the duties of Life, in the form of political commitment, before Art, in the form of Camp aberration.

Yet this opposition and the nature of the apparent choice is both mistaken and fatal. The error is Bayer's, not Bradshaw's. For the failure of the Left was to ignore the implications of style and fantasy and their political potency. Arthur Norris, it would transpire, was more truly a key to Nazi politics than the professional politician.

This shift in the significance of Camp may be seen in the treatment of Baron von Pregnitz. Initially, von Pregnitz is depicted as an essentially clownish figure, a politician with a secret fantasy-life, culled from English school stories, of ruling an island of boys himself. He is implicated in Norris' illegal activities and is quickly accepted by Bradshaw as another caricature. The world of Norris and von Pregnitz is sado-masochistic but essentially comic; it does not touch Bradshaw because he sees it as Camp. But the conclusion of the novel expresses the intrusion of Nazi force as a grim parody of parody. The comic relationships of the Norris-von Pregnitz circle involve caricatures of “strength” (such as Olga) and “weakness” (Norris in his abdominal belt). The Nazis bring the iron of reality into such fantasies. Von Pregnitz dies after a ludicrous failed suicide attempt in a station lavatory. Sado-masochistic games have been replaced by a politics just as dedicated to style, fantasy, and exaggeration as Mortmere. In the same way, the Loathly Lady who had earlier been part of the same game becomes hideously real in the person of Helen Pratt, a journalist who carries her “toughness” to the point of caricature:

But not even Goring could silence Helen Pratt. She had decided to investigate the atrocities on her own account. Morning, noon, and night, she nosed around the city, ferreting out the victims or their relations, cross-examining them for details. These unfortunate people were reticent, of course, and deadly scared. They didn't want a second dose. But Helen was as relentless as their torturers. She bribed, cajoled, pestered. Sometimes, losing her patience, she threatened. What would happen to them afterwards frankly didn't interest her. She was out to get facts.

It was Helen who first told me that Bayer was dead. She had absolutely reliable evidence. One of the office staff, since released, had seen his corpse in the Spandau barracks. “It's a funny thing,” she added, “his left ear was torn right off. … Why, Bill, what's the matter? You're going green round the gills.”

(180)

The Camp torturers have been transformed into reality, and Bayer, the father-figure of the Left, has himself become the victim of the new politics. Now that the line between Art and Life has been blurred, it is nevertheless clear that the “irrelevant” world of Camp contained truer political metaphors than any orthodox analysis—of Right or Left.

Isherwood did not rest upon this apparent paradox. Goodbye to Berlin is an altogether more sombre book than Mr. Norris, taking the key motifs of the earlier novel from comic fantasy into nightmare. But Camp is again an implicit referent throughout. With the passage of time—the Berlin fiction proceeds chronologically—the Nazis are now ascendant and not only is Camp innocence overtaken by an evil parody of itself but “disease” (in social terms) must again be re-defined. The Nazi doctor in “On Ruegen Island” with his passion for physical fitness and anti-Semitism is clearly suffering from the most profound sickness. “Aberrance” has become an ironic term. When he sneers at Peter Wilkinson, Isherwood, and their youthful friend, the homosexual underworld takes on the appearance of a threatened “normality.” What is “disease” to physicians such as these? “On Ruegen Island” is also a reminder of Mr. Norris: for here is von Pregnitz's island of boys transformed from a “sick” fantasy into a (relatively speaking) healthy actuality, threatened by the forces of inhumanity.

Sally Bowles contains the most self-evidently Camp elements in Goodbye to Berlin. Sally herself is a caricature of the demi-mondaine, a wraith of the 90s with a dream of the Stage, pathetically unable to sustain her role. It is entirely significant that she sings nightly at a club called Lady Windermere's Fan. Sally, like Arthur Norris, is an essentially literary conception—a Murger grissette brought forward in time. The progress of Isherwood's relationship with her has symbolic importance. He begins, as he did with Norris, by being charmed—she fits his still flickering fin de siècle fantasy—only to be first humiliated by her (as he was by Norris) and then to witness her victimization by a cheap poseur, as Life refuses to sustain the needs of a literary dream.

But the Camp figure of Sally, compounded of gestures and exaggeration, is a means to explore the human. In one key scene Isherwood contrasts the roles that he and Sally assume for themselves with the realities of Germany. They are discussing a proposed round-the-world trip with Clive, an eccentric rich American:

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.

(49)

This affectation of a Faustian role is “camped” by irony. Damned and lost they are not, but separated from common humanity they have certainly become. This separation is expressed by contrasting romantic decadence (in Isherwood's gesture) with the social realism of the literary style. The role-playing and its self-consciously underscored exaggeration emphasize the flat, unmetaphorical prose. The narrator's wish to flee with his Camp heroine into an escape fantasy is thus at variance with the politicized style.

This implicit contrast between Camp motifs and social realism provides a brilliant means of exposing the distinction between the “objective” politics of the Left and the fantasy elements of Nazism. In “The Nowaks”—arguably the finest sustained passage in Berlin fiction—the symbolic value of literary tension is most apparent. Some account of the development of the autobiographical persona to this point is necessary here. After the education of William Bradshaw to the vicious nature of political reality in Mr. Norris, Goodbye to Berlin sees Christopher Isherwood encounter his own fantasies grown brutal, real, and heavy with despair. Camp playfulness and insulation is replaced by a world where roles are totally reversed. The “aberrants” become representative of a lost humanity, while the social norm is a perversion of “health.” It is possible to follow several key motifs through Goodbye to Berlin, recognizing their increasing nightmare quality as Camp is swallowed up by everyday fact. In the first story, “A Berlin Diary (Autumn 1930),” Isherwood's landlady, the jolly, knowing Frl. Schroeder, appears at first to be another looming mother figure, more benevolent than is usual in Isherwood's work. But whereas the “mother” of Mr. Norris Changes Trains had been the classic Camp version of the fantasy torturer in Olga, Frl. Schroeder breaks up before Isherwood's eyes into a weeping, frail old woman too human to distance by fantasy as, perhaps, Olga's opposite, the succoring mother. The household disintegrates, rows increase, everyone feels the growing hysteria of the times, and in the last scene Frl. Schroeder collapses in tears, comforted by her lodger, Frl. Mayr: “Lina, my poor child, … what have they done to you?” Sally Bowles follows, and another fantasy figure is brutalized by real life when she suffers an abortion. In “On Ruegen Island,” three young men—Isherwood, Peter Wilkinson, and Otto Nowak—“enjoy” a temporary haven from the newest Germany only to be constantly pestered by the Nazi doctor already mentioned. “Disease” enters the Camp world as a real threat. It is with “The Nowaks,” however, that this motif functions most successfully in reversing Isherwood's sense of social and moral positioning.

Isherwood has renewed acquaintance with Otto Nowak before the story opens. In the first scene he visits the Nowak home, where he is greeted by Frau Nowak. Disease is immediately introduced as he discusses the state of her lungs with her: that sickness, the squalor of the apartment, the scarcely controlled hysteria of the occupants become a frightening example of a worker's home. The social realism which has been detected in this story is less important than the metaphorical journey into nightmare. Like Frl. Schroeder, Frau Nowak images the general social disintegration, but the process has quickened. “She looked far iller than when I had seen her last, with big blue rings under her eyes” (101). Her tuberculosis, advancing with the story, maintains the presence of disease at all times. Otto, meanwhile, is another Camp figure, self-consciously playing the role of the boyish charmer, whose posing quickly degenerates into shallow narcissism. His greeting of Isherwood is characteristic of this. “‘Why … it's Christoph!’ Otto, as usual, had begun by acting at once. His face was slowly illuminated by a sunrise of extreme joy. His cheeks dimpled with smiles. He sprang forward, throwing one arm around my neck, wringing my hand” (103). Consuming disease and the gestures of fantasy symbolize the realities of Germany at large, not only the Nowak home.

By entering the Nowak home, Isherwood has transformed the fin de siècle motif of descent into the nether regions into its Thirties equivalent—an act of “worker-worship.” Otto introduces Isherwood to the cellar lokal at the end of the street, the Alexander Casino, which the latter has visited previously as a “slummer.” Now, from the inside of proletarian life, he revises his attitude towards three of the regular habitues of the Alexander. Pieps, Gerhardt, and Kurt no longer attract the Camp fantasies about crime and criminals displayed in Mr. Norris (where viciousness is concealed by comedy). Now Isherwood stresses the history of abandonment and loneliness shared by the three youths. It is Kurt, however, who provides the extreme case, a potent image of the truly “lost.” “He had a reckless, fatal streak in his character, a capacity for pure sudden flashes of rage against the hopelessness of life. The Germans call it Wut” (120). This despair begins to afflict the narrator as, lying in bed at night, his own fears increase:

Somewhere on the other side of the court a baby began to scream, a window was slammed to, something very heavy, deep in the innermost recesses of the building, thudded dully against a wall. It was alien and mysterious and uncanny, like sleeping out in the jungle alone.

(121)

Isherwood is no longer able to retreat into style and fantasy.

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. … Also, I was secretly worrying about an unpleasant and mysterious rash: it might be due to Frau Nowak's cooking, or worse.

(125)

Disease appears to have passed onto Isherwood himself and the sinking movement of the story continues as we encounter the old cocaine addict in the Alexander who “had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No, No. No” (125). Fin de siècle seeking after Vice comes to rest in this negation. The Nowaks in their next quarrel seem “demonically possessed”—but though the language is still romantic the quality of feeling is not. This descent has no paradox of light through darkness, grace through sin, and ends in despair.

Isherwood flees from the Nowak home, then some weeks later returns on a visit. He finds the Frau Nowak has entered a sanatorium and that the household has sunk even deeper into filth and confusion. When, some time later, Otto asks Isherwood to visit the sanatorium with him, the story enters its final phase.

The sanatorium provides the culminating symbol of a diseased society and Isherwood's first view of the inmates creates a powerful impression of panic and fear:

And now the patients came running out to meet us—awkward padded figures muffled in shawls and blankets, stumbling and slithering on the trampled ice of the path. They were in such a hurry that their blundering charge ended in a slide.

“Muffled” and “padded” the figures are significantly anonymous, a denial of style and individuality. The sickness is now a mass affliction, and Isherwood feels more disgust, at first, than compassion. “Old Mutchen” who shares Frau Nowak's room, is “a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores” (133). The mother-image is now specifically repulsive and gross, no longer stylized. The narrator's own neuroses cannot be “camped” before this desolate fact. What was caricatured and exaggerated in Mortmere—the sexual grotesques and obsessive themes—is now overwhelmingly real. The sanatorium is a male homosexual nightmare. “Women being shut up together in this room had bred an atmosphere which was faintly nauseating, like soiled linen in a cupboard without air” (135). But this generalized reaction is given specific focus as Frau Nowak's younger companions flirt with Otto and Isherwood in a grim parody of sexual rapacity. Frau Nowak tells how Erika has been “educated” since entering the sanatorium. “Would you believe it, Herr Christoph—her aunt sent this little manikin for Christmas, and now she takes it to bed with her every night, because she says she must have a man in her bed” (135). The doll-man, the “hungry” woman with “a kind of desperate resolution” (134), who tells of the husband who beat her and of the sexual dream she still has of him—the horror carries with it hints of the necrophiliac absurdities of Mortmere. This quality of the experience reaches its climax when Isherwood acquiesces in kissing Erna, another patient:

My mouth pressed against Erna's hot, dry lips. I had no particular sensation of contact: all this was part of the long, rather sinister symbolic dream which I seemed to have been dreaming throughout the day.

(137)

Sexually, this is an “extreme situation”—but what might simply be dismissed as a homosexual nightmare of female threat is expressive of the much deeper disturbance which the sanatorium symbolizes. Roles are reversed, “Camp” parody turns to real horror, sex is an index of the more fundamental abnormality German society was to know. The last paragraph of “The Nowaks” contains a vision of engulfing darkness, in which the human is lost in the hysterical mass and need is impossible to distinguish from threat:

They all thronged round us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines. This was the climax of my dream: the instant of nightmare in which it would end. I had an absurd pang of fear that they were going to attack us—a gang of terrifyingly soft muffled shapes—clawing us from our seat, dragging us hungrily down, in dead silence. But the moment passed. They drew back, harmless, after all, as mere ghosts—into the darkness, while our bus … lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow.

(139)

The dream structure of this story, Isherwood's increasing isolation, the motif of descent, and the fear of negation all speak to a political truth of which Ludwig Bayer was unaware. The final two sections of Goodbye to Berlin, “The Landauers” and “A Berlin Diary (Winter 1931-33),” are essentially elegiac. The nightmare is no longer confined. The Nazi reality is Camp without comedy.

Notes

1. “Inside the Whale,” Inside the Whale & Other Essays (Penguin, 1957), p. 38.

2. “About This Book,” The Berlin Stories (New Directions, 1954), p. v. All subsequent references to the Berlin fiction will be to this edition and are included in the text.

3. The Berlin Stories, p. v.

4. (London: Blackmore Press, 1930).

5. Lions and Shadows (London: Four Square, 1963), p. 19.

6. Lions and Shadows, p. 22.

7. Lions and Shadows, p. 33.

8. The larger moral implications of Isherwood's allegiance to Baudelaire are discussed extensively in Alan Wilde's Christopher Isherwood (Twayne, 1971). See p. 124 in particular.

9. Wilde, p. 60.

10. “Art and Neurosis,” The Liberal Imagination (Doubleday, 1957), p. 159.

11. Lions and Shadows, p. 184.

12. All the Conspirators (New Directions, 1958), p. 15.

13. All the Conspirators, p. 126.

14. All the Conspirators, p. 143.

15. All the Conspirators, p. 122.

16. All the Conspirators, p. 136.

17. The World in the Evening (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 125.

18. The World in the Evening, p. 126.

19. See my article, “Goodbye to Berlin: Re-Focussing Isherwood's Camera,” Contemporary Literature, XIII (Winter 1972), 44-53, for an extended discussion of this point.