Goodbye to Berlin was published by the Hogarth Press (Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s press) in 1939. The book consists of six loosely connected narratives, all set in Berlin between 1930 and 1933 — the years during which the Weimar Republic collapsed and the Nazis came to power. The narrator, “Christopher Isherwood” (or “Herr Issyvoo,” as his German friends call him), is a young English writer who has come to Berlin to write, to teach English, and — though this is barely acknowledged in the text — to enjoy the sexual freedom that Berlin offered to homosexual men in the Weimar era.
The most famous section is “Sally Bowles,” the portrait of an English girl in Berlin who sings at a nightclub, conducts chaotic love affairs, and maintains a breezy indifference to the political catastrophe unfolding around her. Sally became an icon — first in John Van Druten’s play I Am a Camera (1951), then in the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret (1966), and finally in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film, where Liza Minnelli’s performance made Sally Bowles one of the most recognizable characters in twentieth-century popular culture. But Isherwood’s Sally is more complex than any of her adaptations: she is not glamorous but messy, not free-spirited but frightened, and her pose of sophisticated detachment is a defense against a world she cannot control.
”I Am a Camera”
The book’s famous declaration — “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” — is both a statement of method and an evasion. Isherwood’s narrator presents himself as a recording device, but the recording is anything but passive: the selection of detail, the arrangement of scenes, the timing of revelations are all the work of an artist of extraordinary skill. The camera metaphor also conceals what Isherwood later acknowledged: the narrator’s homosexuality, which was the real reason he was in Berlin and which the text systematically suppresses, replacing male lovers with female ones in a self-censorship that Isherwood would later describe with characteristic honesty in Christopher and His Kind (1976).
The Political Background
The Nazis are present throughout the book — in street violence, in casual anti-Semitism, in the growing fear of Isherwood’s Jewish friends — but they are never the focus. Isherwood’s method is to show fascism not as a political movement but as an atmosphere: a gradual darkening of everyday life, a slow closing of possibilities, that his characters experience as personal misfortune rather than historical catastrophe. The effect is more powerful than any direct political analysis.
Collecting Goodbye to Berlin
First edition (Hogarth Press, London, 1939): Cloth binding, dust jacket with blue/gray design.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $3,000–$8,000
- Very good/very good: $1,000–$3,000
- Good/no jacket: $200–$500
- Signed: $5,000–$12,000