Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood
Early 1930s Berlin. It's a period of history I (certainly used to) know about in considerable depth and detail. I studied it extensively at GCSE level, and have since absorbed a few other morsels of knowledge from several of my friends who studied it even more extensively at A-level. This book was brilliant to read in the light of my previous studies (and would have been fantastic to read at the time of studying, too, to complement the history course) because it was a great piece of fiction, but the historical context of the rise of the Nazis was discernibly bubbling under the surface all the way through.
I'm going to start by praising Isherwood's cast of characters, because I don't feel a review of this book would be complete without giving them a mention. The book largely follows the main character Christopher Isherwood (yes, he has the same name as the author, but is apparently not supposed to represent him in particular) and his interactions with a variety of eccentric people in Berlin. And I can't think of a more apt descriptor for them than eccentric. The characters were mad, mysterious, funny, frustrating - it was often their entertaining unusual-ness that made this book such a good read.
But the feature of this book that interested me even more than the characters was the structure. The book has six clear sections, each one functioning almost as a sketch or a short story in its own right. But in spite of this, it didn't feel like a short story collection. This was down to a number of factors: firstly, the narrator and main character Christopher was the same in every part. Secondly, the stories formed a linear and roughly continuous narrative. Thirdly, multiple characters appeared in multiple sections. So while the novel was episodic in structure, it was by no means fragmented or truncated. We were following one character, in one place, living one life - it's just that there were some gaps of elapsed time between each new chapter. Rather like a series of excerpts from a diary. It was the highlights taken from a period of three years, and it hung together surprisingly well.
I noted from the brief foreword that Isherwood originally intended this to be a much larger-scale novel, but these six chapters are the only fragments that remain from this plan. I find this serendipity quite pleasing, in that this successful novel was born out of a plan for something else - these six segments were never meant to be presented in this format, and yet it works so fantastically well. There's something quite magical about the formation of a piece of literature out of a failed plan, I think.
But there was something else about the structure that I thought was particularly striking and particularly clever: the six sections became progressively more political. The Nazi party did feature in the first section, but only as an aside, something that was mentioned frivolously and then moved away from fairly quickly. But as the book went on, the political situation in Berlin became more and more significant, the references to the Nazis and their actions became more and more explicit, and there was an undeniable sense of normality slipping away as Hitler's grasp on Germany tightened.
By the final section, the politics was no longer lurking beneath the surface as a subplot to the main narrative, but it was the main focus. The events were more shocking than in previous sections, with people being attacked on the streets, or arrested for their anti-Nazi views. There was a new underlying sense of fear of being discovered as Nazi opposition - Christopher even referred to other Nazi-opposers using their initials rather than their names, creating an eerie sense of anonymity. And the tone of the narration seemed more pessimistic and more resigned to Berlin's inevitable fate.
This was effective because up to this point all the sketches were very personal. They explored close relationships, like Otto and Peter's relationship which could certainly be read as homosexual, and intimate moments, like Bernhard finally opening up about his past one evening on the jetty, and family matters, like Frau Nowak's health crisis and its impact on the family dynamics. The settings were always very domestic: family homes, or boarding houses, or otherwise dates in the corners of cafés. So Isherwood's decision to juxtapose this with the politics of the rise of the Nazis becoming more and more prominent was clever because it showed the impact of Hitler's rise to power on the lives of normal people. Isherwood's illustration of the inexorable encroachment of politics into these domestic and personal tales is probably a pretty accurate reflection of how it felt to live in Berlin in the early 1930s.
Overall, Goodbye to Berlin was a great read. It was well-written, with an interesting and entertaining cast, and it worked extremely well as a portrait of early Nazi threat, which had such a profound impact on people's everyday lives. I'm sure that's why it's called 'Goodbye to Berlin' - it's an elegy to the decline of a city and its culture, saying goodbye to Berlin as people knew it.