The Berlin Stories was published by New Directions in 1945, combining Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) in a single volume. The omnibus has become the standard way to read Isherwood’s Berlin fiction, and the pairing strengthens both books — the comic picaresque of Mr Norris gains depth from the darker, more fragmented narratives of Goodbye to Berlin, while the latter’s episodic structure is grounded by the sustained character study of the former.
Read together, the two books constitute one of the great portraits of a city in English literature. Isherwood’s Berlin is a place of extraordinary vitality — sexual, intellectual, artistic — and extraordinary fragility. The cafes, the cabarets, the rooming houses, the streets are all rendered with a specificity that makes them as vivid as Dickens’s London or Joyce’s Dublin. But the reader knows, as Isherwood’s narrator does not always know, that everything described is about to be destroyed. The dramatic irony — the gap between the characters’ present and the reader’s knowledge of the future — gives the stories a poignancy that intensifies with every rereading.
The influence of The Berlin Stories extends far beyond literature. The musical Cabaret, the films, the entire cultural image of Weimar Berlin as a place of decadent glamour and political doom — all derive ultimately from Isherwood’s pages.
Collecting The Berlin Stories
First edition (New Directions, New York, 1945): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good/very good: $100–$300