Response To Goodbye To Berlin Essay Research

Response To Goodbye To Berlin Essay, Research Paper

A Response to Goodbye to Berlin

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking (Isherwood 1). This phrase comes from the first page of Christopher Isherwood s most popular documentary styled novel, Goodbye to Berlin (1939). In this novel, Isherwood managed to establish a sort of matter-of-fact style by blending fact and fiction and achieving a na ve, honest style for the narrator. The phrase I am a camera often appears in his work indicating his belief that a narrator should serve the role of a simple recording device (Caudwell 2). By achieving this, Isherwood provides the readers with an unsurpassed portrait of Berlin, a city in the process of internal decay, in the turbulent years of Hitler’s rise in power. It is as if Isherwood is masquerading as a war correspondent (Piazza 2). Isherwood is the outsider looking in, observing a war (holocaust) in which he is not involved; but he does show glimpses and portraits of characters that have been affected by it. He immerses himself in the world of prostitutes, living almost anonymously in shabbily genteel and working class areas of the city and translating his experience of the demimonde image of what would eventually become the definitive portrait of pre-Hitler Germany, in Goodbye to Berlin (Summers 1). Because Isherwood brilliantly recorded what he saw, Goodbye to Berlin is a valuable social document, which provides an insight into Isherwood s handling the theme of war. In this research paper, the main concentration is set on the effects (private and social) the introduction of war, by the Nazism movement, has on the individual portraits (characters) of Berlin. Against the bleak but garnish background of a falling city, Sally Bowles, Peter and Otto, The Nowaks, The Landauers, and other Berlin denizens shuffle through their shabby cabaret choreography (Bryfonski, Harris 283).

In the novel, As explorations of the ways in which public and private concern Intersect, they are politically engaged. The brooding specter of Nazism hovers in the background, finally to impinge even on characters as indifferent to politics as the landlady Fraulin Schroeder and the innocently naughty cabaret singer Sally Bowles (Summers 1). This statement proves to be true about all the characters, from the major to minor. Each one is effected in their own sort of way by this dramatic political change in the city of Berlin. The loosely connected sequence of diaries in the novel achieves unity, between the characters, as the result of the structural principles. One involves the deliberate balancing of economic, sexual, social, cultural, and political polarities in its various sections and among its disparate characters. Beneath such oppositions as rich and poor, homosexual and heterosexual, Jew and Gentile, Communist and Nazi is a shared reality of the deadened spirit that unites everyone in the book, even as it makes real integration impossible (Summers 1). The other source of unity is the continuing and developing presence of the narrator. His inability to connect meaningfully with any of the polarized characters, despite his open sympathy for them all, mirrors the state of Berlin itself. His personal failure to achieve intimacy is symptomatic of the social disease that blights the city and that culminates in the spiritual death represented by Hitler s triumph (Summers 2).

As the political situation deteriorates, Isherwood s portraits darken. There is an increasing sense of suffocation, a sinking of human consciousness, as people discover

themselves locked in hopeless situations, tapped by the approaching horror of Nazism (Piazza 3). But, contrary to the belief, not all of the characters experienced a dramatic change to this movement. Some were not greatly effected nor terribly concerned for various reasons.

Fraulin Schroeder is the first character that is encountered in the story. She is a landlady in around her mid fifties. The narrator describes this very colorful woman as

shapeless but alert with inquisitive eyes and pretty brown hair, and who usually has the tendency of peeping and spying on her lodgers. By hearing her story, it is clear that this woman has been terribly effected by the changes in Berlin, in an economic and also in a social manner. 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 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 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 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, I d have slapped his face for him. But you get used to it. You can get used to anything (Isherwood 3). In the flat, there are small heavy objects scattered around the room that represent a time when life was different for her her age of plenty . But those objects are really the only things of hers that haven t been destroyed by the war movem