Christopher and his Kind... Wider Reading 19: Goodbye to Berlin

Although The Diary of Anne Frank is considered by many to be the foremost manuscript on the subject of the holocaust, there are other texts which link in both form and content. The diaries of Christopher Isherwood which include Sally Bowles and A Berlin Diary, collectively titled as Goodbye to Berlin, also provide a first-hand account of Jewish mistreatment at the hands of the Nazi party, but this time through the eyes of an Englishman visiting the Weimar Republic’s capital during Hitler’s rise to power. Though the novelist himself experiences an identity struggle of a different kind, namely that of a Briton and homosexual in an increasingly anti-English/gay country, both Frank and Isherwood express their desire for the improvement of matters in their personal, and now famous diaries.

Isherwood is also well-known for rubbing shoulders with the famous English-American poet W.H. Auden, with whom he collaborated on three plays and became his literary mentor. It was Auden who compelled the writer to travel to Berlin in the first place, on the promise of a thriving, illicit sexual underworld populated by “boys.” It was here that Isherwood met his “first great love,” a young German boy named Heinz Neddermeyer. The pair left Berlin in 1933, he and Heinz moved around Europe, living in Copenhagen, Sintra and elsewhere. Heinz was arrested as a draft-evader in 1937 following a brief return to Germany after he was ejected from Luxembourg as an "undesirable alien". He was sentenced to six months in prison, a year of state labour and two years of compulsory military service.

Isherwood’s sexual orientation was of course shunned by his upper middle class upbringing. It was partly this reason that he travelled to the city which would provide so much of his artistic inspiration: being unable to express himself at home, he journeyed to Berlin due to its reputation for sexual freedom. The capital, at this time, was rapidly developing its own sense of identity. The fierce power and organisation of the Nazi party was empowering to the German people after the disaster of the Great War, and people voted for Hitler in their thousands. The increasing threat of war radiating from Britain gave many citizens a sense of antagonism towards anybody who was English, which forced Isherwood to leave to ensure his own safety and that of Heinz.

The stark clarity with which the writer records his experiences recalls the exact quality of a photograph, rather than a writer. Isherwood himself, in fact, recognised this, and begins his collection with the statement that:

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Yours, Christopher