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Goodbye to Berlin
1939 novel by Christopher Isherwood
Goodbye to Berlin
Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 novel by English-American writer Christopher Isherwood set during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. The novel recounts Isherwood's 1929–1932 sojourn in Berlin as a pleasure-seeking British expatriate on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany. The work consists of a "series of sketches of disintegrating Berlin, its slums and nightclubs and comfortable villas, its odd maladapted types and its complacent burghers." Isherwood drew many plot details from factual events, and he based the novel's characters on actual persons. Jean Ross, a 19-year-old flapper who briefly shared lodgings with Isherwood, inspired Sally Bowles, one of the main characters in the novel. During Isherwood's time abroad in Germany, the young author witnessed the country's rapid political and social unraveling. He saw extreme "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right." Following...
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