While they’re generally published as The Berlin Stories, Vintage decided to upgrade the billing in this reprint. It brings together Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Farewell to Berlin, two novels-that-aren’t in which Isherwood discusses his time in the German capital during the declining days of the Weimar Republic. 

I must admit that my reading of Isherwood’s work was coloured by the film Cabaret. How could it not be? But I caught only glimpses of that film in the text: while Sally Bowles is present, she is most distinctly non-Liza, even if she does wear scandalous nail colours. The film certainly mines the spirit of the work – a sort of dancing on the edge of the precipice, skirting Otto Dix tableaux wherever possible – but it is its own thing. Thankfully, the novels are more than capable of keeping one’s interest. (I demand there be a film of the Norris/Bradshaw story! Admittedly there’s maybe not room for an impish Joel Grey, but it cries out for an adaptation.)

Written in 1933 and 1939 respectively, the books still seem impossibly modern. There’s a real sense of impending doom – which of course was reality for those whose lives were grist for Isherwood’s mill – but the characters, as humans throughout time have done, seem more interested in avoiding trouble, sinking some piss and getting up to arty shenanigans. Reading the travails of the crooks, the drunks and the flaneurs within, it’s difficult to believe that they were in the path of the Nazi juggernaut. I suppose that’s the banality of evil, isn’t it? The restrictions through the works ratchet up, even as people become more accommodating of the regime’s demands because for most, I guess, it’s easier. You get the sense that yep, it could happen here because if the clubs are open, who gives a fuck?

There’s a definite love for Berlin in the text – fitting given that Isherwood lived there from 1929–1933, more or less, and it’s there that he discovered “his tribe” in love – but it’s the author’s still at portraiture that really makes the novels work. Really, “being in Berlin” is most of the narrative of the books – the gold is in the descriptions of the characters attempting to eke out a life in the face of the oncoming horrors. There’s stuff in here that will break your heart… and it’ll immediately be followed by hilarity. Astounding.

I feel really dumb that I left it this long to read these: they’re bloody great. And of course, it means I need to watch Cabaret again.