Goodbye to Berlin

The novel “Goodbye, Berlin,” is perhaps Christopher Isherwood’s most famous work. Its plot served as the basis for the script of the Broadway musical “Cabaret” and for Bob Fosse’s cult film of the same name with Liza Minnelli in the leading role. This book is often called, somewhat autobiographical, a novel—yet with the same success it could be considered a conceptual collection of stories. Stories united by a common hero, time, and place.

So, the hero is a not-very-well-off young English writer. The time is a strange, shifting, twilight era at the very beginning of the 1930s, just before the National Socialists come to power. And finally, the place is Berlin, the most bohemian of the megacities of prewar Europe. A decadent, nervous Berlin of the “jazz age”—a city where, in some unimaginable knot, the fates of bohemian girls of very loose morals tangle together, as they go mad with the permissiveness of the rich, with prosperous Jewish intellectuals, and many, many other passengers of a debauched Noah’s ark of freedom—an ark that very soon will become a “Titanic.”