Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin

A friend bought this for me this for a trip to Berlin I made for my birthday a few years back. It was my first time visiting and I wanted to get a better feel for the history of the place before going.

The musical and film Cabaret are based on this book which is one of the classics pieces of fiction from Weimar-era '30s Berlin which was a fascinating time in the history of fascinating city. On the one hand Berlin was one of the most creative and socially liberal cities in the world. It was at the heart of the explosion of new cinema. Its actors, singers, directors, artists and authors were world famous and the city was famously socially tolerant of all lifestyles, religions.

On the other it was all the beginning of the rise to political office of Hitler and the Nazis. They hadn't acquired their full power and Jews were just beginning to be targeted so this book looks at Nazi-ism without the benefit of hindsight and all the horrors that would eventually be carried out.

The book is semi-autobiographical and looks at Christopher Isherwood's time in Berlin where he thought English to rich Germans during the day and hung out with the international demi-mondaines at night. It amazing that 70 years before blogs were invented that this book was almost written as if it were one. It's full of chatty gossip, observations of interesting people and their interesting situations without any major over-arching narrative. And that's what make it interesting. It's easy to read in bitesize chunks.

It's deeply funny and richly observed and it's exactly as you would imagine someone living in Germany before the war to be thinking about things. One of my favourite books.