A long goodbye to Berlin

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Lucasta Miller has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Christopher Isherwood pioneered what is now known as ‘autofiction’ long before it acquired that label. His best known work, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which later inspired the musical Cabaret, was based on the diaries he kept while living in the Weimar Republic in his twenties. He’d already used the material before in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), a brilliant black comedy thriller that deserves to be read alongside more supposedly serious works of modernism. Forty years later, he reworked the experiences yet again in Christopher and His Kind (1977), in which he finally made explicit, for the new gay liberation era, what had been suppressed in the earlier works: his homosexuality, which had previously been outlawed.

Although Isherwood emigrated to America in early 1939, and spent the second half of his life in California, he could never quite say goodbye to Berlin. Nor could he give up exploring the ambiguous boundaries between memoir and fiction, a habit that was inculcated early. Born in 1904 into the decaying English gentry, he was already composing autofiction aged six, dictating his first work, The History of my Friends, to his mother, herself an inveterate diarist. Although he so identified with her in childhood that he dressed up in her clothes, he later experienced her as a suffocating presence who needed to be ejected, along with the entire English establishment. But he would carry on in the same literary vein throughout his long and prolific career, transforming his personal acquaintance into ‘characters’ in book after book, from his literary confrères W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender in Lions and Shadows (1938) to his parents in Kathleen and Frank (1971).

Most famously, he transformed Jean Ross, the rebellious, young, upper-middle-class Englishwoman he befriended in Berlin, into the subsequently iconic Sally Bowles, though his version has none of the slick glamour of Liza Minelli in the 1972 film.