Footsteps : Looking for Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin

Written By Unknown on Sabtu, 13 April 2013 | 17.35

When Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929, the 25-year-old British novelist could not quite bring himself to settle down in one place.

Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif.

The writer Christopher Isherwood, around 1932.

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Gordon Welters for The New York Times

The scene at Heile Welt (Perfect World), a bar in Schöneberg, near where Christopher Isherwood lived from 1930 to 1933.

At one point he changed addresses three times in three months. There was the room he could barely afford next to the former Institute for Sexual Research in leafy Tiergarten park. There was the cramped, leaky attic flat that he shared with a family of five in Kreuzberg. And there was the apartment around Kottbusser Tor, in those days a slum (now a night-life hub), where he was pleased to discover that he was the sole Englishman when he went to register with the police.

"He liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who penetrate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives and die in unknown graves, envied by their stay-at-home compatriots," Isherwood wrote of this period in "Christopher and His Kind," his third-person memoir of the 1930s.

Isherwood would not feel out of place in Berlin today, which is still a destination for the young and the creative. While fashions may have changed, Isherwood's work still captures the essence of the German capital, with its art collections stashed in former bunkers, and louche nightclubs hiding behind unmarked doors.

The seductive excitement of Weimar-era Berlin — with its limitless sexual possibilities for the curious gay writer and parties where dancers "swayed in partial-paralytic rhythms under a huge sunshade suspended from the ceiling" — quickly inspired Isherwood. He steeped himself in the sordid and the refined, the red-light bars and the villas, the decadence and the apprehension of a city whose freewheeling spirit was about to be extinguished by Nazi terror. "Here was the seething brew of history in the making," the author wrote in his memoir.

In December 1930, Isherwood finally settled into an apartment, at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in the Schöneberg district. The building was full of eccentrics who are now known through their fictional incarnations in novels like "The Last of Mr. Norris" (1935) and "Goodbye to Berlin" (1939). He lived there with Jean Ross, the model for his most famous character, the capricious nightclub singer and aspiring actress Sally Bowles, who captivated him with her "air of not caring a curse what people thought of her." His landlady, Meta Thurau, inspired the character of Fräulein Schroeder, who, in Isherwood's fiction, symbolized the typical Berliner of the time. In dire economic straits after World War I, and forced to take in lodgers, she was at first skeptical of Hitler. Eventually she adapted to popular sentiment, in which locals "thrilled with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like school-boys, because the Jews, their business rivals, and the Marxists ... had been satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and the inflation, and were going to catch it."

The street Isherwood called home for two and a half years was bombed during World War II, and now the stately prewar buildings — including the one where he lived, with its pale yellow facade mounted with concrete lion heads — are mixed with uninspiring modern constructions. A fetish fashion workshop and a rare-book store share the ground floor of his former building; across the street, visitors can choose between a kabbalah center and a speakeasy-style cocktail bar, Stagger Lee, where one rings a brass doorbell to enter. Around the corner there is a six-month-old 1920s-themed cafe with musical performances named after Sally Bowles.

Still, Nollendorfstrasse doesn't seem all that different from how the author described it in the opening lines of "Goodbye to Berlin": "From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices."


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