Goodbye To Berlin

“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.”

Isherwood spends time with two very different families: the Nowaks and the Landauers. Both families are victims of their economic circumstances. While it might be easy to see the problems associated with poverty, wealth brings its own paranoia and enemies.

“Like everyone else in Berlin, she refers continually to the political situation, but only briefly, with a conventional melancholy, as when one speaks of religion.”

Frl. Hippi, like others in Berlin, sees the rise of Nazism as something beyond her control. It is something ubiquitous—something that exists around a person, rather than something a person can affect. This view is likely to engender apathy about politics.

“‘I think,’ said Sally, ‘it must be marvelous to be a novelist. You’re frightfully dreamy and unpractical and unbusinesslike, and people imagine they can fairly swindle you as much as they want—and then you sit down and write a book about them which fairly shows them what swine they all are, and it’s the most terrific success and you make pots of money.’”

Isherwood is challenging popular notions of what a novelist is and what a novelist does. Isherwood himself eschews the tropes of dreamy, unpractical, and unbusinesslike; he doesn’t slander anyone in Goodbye to Berlin, and he’s doubtful of his novel’s success.

“But seriously, I believe I’m a sort of Ideal Woman, if you know what I mean. I’m the sort of woman who can take men away from their wives, but I could never keep anybody for long. And that’s because I’m the type which every man imagines he wants, until he gets me; and then he finds he doesn’t really, after all.”

Much of Sally’s character comes down to a divide between perception and reality. Sally wants people to perceive that she’s mature, worldly, decadent, and happy. But the truth is that she is rarely any of these things. When someone gets close enough to Sally, the charade is revealed, and the truth is rarely appealing.

“You must remember I’m a woman, Christopher. All women like men to be strong and decided and following out their careers. A woman wants to be motherly to a man and protect his weak side, but he must have a strong side too, which she can respect.”

Sally’s character subverts many of the tropes of what is considered proper behavior for a woman but Sally resorts to these same tropes of what is considered proper behavior for a man in order to cut Isherwood down during an argument. Sally seems unaware of her own hypocrisy on this point.

“‘You know, Sally,’ I said, ‘what I really like about you is that you’re awfully easy to take in. People who never get taken in are so dreary.’”

Isherwood prefers the flawed Sally Bowles to the Ideal-Woman version of Sally Bowles. Sally doesn’t like to be made a fool because it reveals the inconsistency between people’s perception of her and reality. Isherwood would contend that the ideal is rarely interesting.

“I could understand him better than I could understand Pieps or Gerhardt, because he was consciously unhappy. He had a reckless, fatal streak in his character, a capacity for pure sudden flashes of rage against the hopelessness of his life.”

Throughout the novel, there are many characters that express sadness. Only briefly, at the beginning of the novel, does Isherwood discuss his own sadness. Moments like this, where Isherwood is able to connect emotionally with a character’s sadness, remind us of that same hopelessness buried in our narrator. Isherwood regularly comments about his connection with other depressive characters.

“I was trying to get on with my novel. It was about a family who lived in a large country house on unearned incomes and were very unhappy. They spent their time explaining to each other why they couldn’t enjoy their lives; and some of the reasons—though I say it myself—were most ingenious.”

Here, Isherwood references his fictional novel inside the novel. However, the family he describes sounds as if it could be any number of the families in Berlin he has met. Again, Isherwood seems drawn to unhappy characters, both in the fictional novel he’s writing and in the novel he exists in.

“It is not enough to say: I have made my Abitur, I have my degree at the university. He will answer: ‘Please, where is my dinner?’”

Natalie Landauer is rigid in her beliefs about the roles men and women are meant to play. Here, Isherwood uses this rigidity to comic effect.

“‘The best of all,’ I said, ‘would be for us to make noises like farmyard animals. I like hearing the sound of your voice, but I don’t care a bit what you’re saying. So it’d be far better if we just said Bow-wow and Baa and Meaow.’”

This is one of the few times Isherwood gives Natalia his honest opinion on something, though it’s at her expense. It also exists as one of the few times in the novel that Isherwood responds with petty malice. He doesn’t like to be questioned about his sincere feelings by Natalia.

“Shall we allow that the man of genius is an exceptional person who may do exceptional things? Or shall we say: No—you may write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, but in your daily life, you must behave like an ordinary person, and you must obey these laws which we have made for ordinary persons? We will not allow you to be extra-ordinary.”

This ethical dilemma wasn’t just something to consider during the time of Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde. The question of Can an artist’s behavior be separated from the artist’s art? is a perennial issue. Ezra Pound and Woody Allen might be two more examples of artists who have done reprehensible things and yet have created artwork that people admire.

“Most rich people, once they have decided to trust you at all, can be imposed upon to almost any extent. They only real problem for the private tutor is to get inside the front door.”

We see this assertion play out throughout the novel, both at the Bernsteins’ and at the Landauers’. Isherwood is quickly welcomed into the family once he has made initial contact.

“‘Of course,’ said Sally gravely, after a pause, ‘I’d never let love interfere with my work. Work comes before everything […] But I don’t believe that a woman can be a great actress who hasn’t had any love affairs—.”

In the same breath, Sally seems to equate her love affairs with a kind of work. She mentions that she keeps many of the men she’s involved with around in case they can be of use to her later. Having love affairs is almost the only work we see Sally perform in the novel.

“I believe in discipline for myself, not necessarily for others. For others, I cannot judge. I know only that I myself must have certain standards which I obey and without which I am quite lost.”

Bernhard echoes a similar sort of sentiment that Isherwood hears from a Nazi-sympathizing surgeon from Berlin: “What people need is discipline, self-control. I can tell you this as a doctor. I know if from my own experience.” The doctor believes all people need his vision of discipline and self-control, whereas Bernhard is unwilling to make that prescription.

“You like to flatter yourself that you are a man of the world and that no form of weakness disgusts you, but your training is too strong for you. People ought not to talk to each other like this, you feel. It is not good form.”

Bernhard parallels Natalia’s opinion that Isherwood doesn’t talk about what he’s really feeling and really thinking. Bernhard offers a harsher critique and takes it one step further: he insists Isherwood’s conditioning from society prevents him from doing so.

“However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch.”

During this moment, guests at Bernhard’s party celebrate. Isherwood, however, sees the writing on the wall about the future of the country. It adds a sense of foreboding to the remainder of the chapter.

“Perhaps I am slow at jokes. At any rate, it took me nearly eighteen months to see the point of this one—to recognize it as Bernhard’s last, most daring and most cynical experiment upon us both. For now I am certain—absolutely convinced—that his offer was perfectly serious.”

Isherwood’s realization comes too late to save Bernhard. Much of Isherwood’s relationship with Bernhard involved trying to decipher him as a person and understand what his motivations were. Isherwood’s failure to understand Bernhard is his failure to save him.

“The tickling and bottom-slapping days are over.”

Stylistically, this funny turn of phrase accurately captures the mood at Frl. Schroeder’s apartment during the winter. The reader gets a sense that the heightened political turmoil in Berlin adds to the feeling that the fun times are gone.

“The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.”

While Isherwood here is making an observation about a wrestling match, he means to extrapolate: the “anybody” or “anything” is a direct comment on Hitler and the Nazi party. At the end of the novel, we even see Frl. Schroeder begin to succumb to Nazi propaganda.

“‘Eventually we’re all queer,’ drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones.”

The double meaning of the word “queer” is used to great effect. There is ambiguity surrounding Isherwood’s acknowledgement that he is gay. The brief confrontation outside the Salomé and the deadpan delivery by both Fritz and Isherwood make for a great comedic scene.

“‘Sometimes I almost despair,’ he added. ‘It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world today.’”

The word “badness” is vague and childish, yet we instantly recognize the feeling captured in the word. Herr Brink, the master of a reformatory, is using the language of children to express something very serious.

“Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.”

Isherwood has the privilege of being able to leave Berlin. In doing so, he must be reminded that he has always been something of a tourist there. It’s his lack of obligations there that frees him from most of the harshest realities of the Nazi régime.

“The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city.”

Stylistically, there is a jarring juxtaposition between the sun shining and Hitler as master. The subtext of this sentence illuminates that society, under the reign of the Nazis, is out of step with the natural accord of the world.