Monday, March 2, 2020

Christopher Isherwood : Goodbye to Berlin

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Biography



Christopher Isherwood


104 Born in Chesire, England


114-1 attended various schools, studied medicine at Kings College in Write my Essay on Christopher Isherwood : Goodbye to Berlin for me


London, but never got a degree


18 his first novel All the Conspirators is published


1-1 moved to Berlin with Auden and taught English, 11 meets Jean


Ross, the model for Sally Bowles


18 travels to China with Auden


1 The Berlin Stories his best known work, is published includes Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains


Moves to southern California, and works on films in Hollywood


146 becomes a US citizen


186 dies in Santa Monica, California


After he moved to California, he worked in Hollywood, and in the 70s became a


leading spokesman and supporter of gay rights. He also taught at several


universities including UCLA. Later he met his guru Swami Prabhavananda, and


began studying Hinduism and translated the Bhagavad Gita, and was interested in


mysticism and considered becoming a monk of the Ramakrishna order.


Throughout his life he workedhad contact with



W.H. Auden



Aldous Huxley


Tennessee Williams


Liza Minnelli--won Best Actress Oscar, Golden Globe for Best Actress, and


British Academy of Film and TV Arts Award for her first singing role in the


movie Cabaret done in 17



Style



"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking…," this quote, pulled from the first page of Isherwood' s narrative "Goodbye to Berlin," gives an accurate representation of the stylistic approach he takes in the narrative. He is quite detached in his approach and simply narrates short public events in private lives to evoke political events of that time period. -Isherwood uses his own name as a character, but describes it as "only a convenient ventriloquists dummy, nothing more." Although, he uses this character and others in the narrative, to describe himself and situations throughout the narrative. Short Summery -described as "A roughly continuous narrative...of a Pre-Hitler Berlin." -"Goodbye to Berlin" is also considered one of the most significant political novels of the 0th Century. Christopher Isherwood divides the narrative into six parts, which are each distinct inquiries into various socio-economic perspectives of a "Pre-Hitler Berlin." -He writes of experiences with Fräulein Schroeder, his landlady; Sally Bowles, the English "upper-class waif"; The Nowaks, a struggling working-class family; and The Landauers, a wealthy Jewish family. All of whom are affected by this crumbling society.


Historical Background


p. 0"You can go in the tram … I will not have them throwing stones at my beautiful car."


October 1, 10


Hitler and the Nazis waged a campaign in 10 unlike anything ever seen in Germany. Hitler traveled the country delivering dozens of major speeches, attending meetings, shaking hands, signing autographs, posing for pictures, and even kissing babies. Goebbels brilliantly organized thousands of meetings, torchlight parades, plastered posters everywhere and printed millions of copies of special editions of Nazi newspapers.


On Election Day, September 14, 10, the Nazis received 6,71,000 votes, over eighteen percent of the total, and were thus entitled to 107 seats in the German Reichstag. It was a stunning victory for Hitler. Overnight, the Nazi party went from the smallest to the second largest party in Germany.


On October 1, dressed in their brown shirts, the elected Nazi deputies marched in unison into the Reichstag and took their seats. When the roll call was taken, each one shouted, Present! Heil Hitler!


Nazis dressed in civilian clothes celebrated their victory by smashing in the windows of Jewish shops, restaurants and department stores.


p. 4"Today … the Nazis held a demonstration on the Bülowplatz … I went along to watch it with Frank, the newspaper correspondent."



January , 1


Horst Wessel, a member of the SA, was murdered by Communists in 10. Goebbels turned him into a Nazi martyr and hero, and Wessels song Die Fahne Hoch! became the favourite Nazi marching song. After the Nazi takeover of the government in 1, Bülowplatz was renamed Horst Wessel Platz, and on January Communists were thrown out of their headquarters at the Karl Liebknecht Haus, which became SA headquarters and a shrine to Horst Wessel.


p. 5"Hitler came, and the Reichstag fire … I wondered what was happening to Bernhard."


February 7, 1


The Reichstag, seat of parliamentary government in Germany, was in recess, quiet and empty except for a night watchman. On the evening of February 7, smoke was observed coming from the building, and in less than ten minutes firemen were on the scene. However, flames had already broken out all over the building, and then a tremendous explosion enveloped the central chamber in flames. The fire quickly raced out of control, and soon only the walls of the gutted building were still standing. Within minutes, police arrested a half-naked and seemingly dazed Dutchman, Marinus Van der Lubbe, who was discovered at the scene. Hitler and Göring arrived, and Göring immediately accused the communists of setting the fire. Van der Lubbe was tried and executed for the crime; however, a great deal of evidence points to an SA/SS Sondergruppe.


Before the sun rose on February 8th, over 4,000 communists other intellectuals and professional men targeted by the Nazis were arrested. Hitler convinced Hindenburg to sign an emergency decree suspending the basic rights of the citizens for the duration of the emergency. This decree also authorized the Reich government to assume full powers in any federal state whose government proved unable to restore public order, ordered death or imprisonment for a number of crimes including some newly invented such as resistance to the decree itself.



Structure



-"loosely connected sequence of of diaries and sketches"


-first and last chapter "Berlin Diaries" serve as a frame for chapters -5 (middle part)


-Berlin Diary I (Fall 10) light-hearted opening and carefree style


@ description of Narrator " I am a camera with its shutter open, quite


passive, recording, not thinking..." .


@ portrait of Berlin and its inhabitants during the final .5 years of Weimar


Republic before Nazi take-over


@ Berlin inhabitants represent misfits of the whole German society


@ "Isherwood s" roommates help to establish atmosphere of Berlin s decay


and help demonstrate this crisis


-mood gradually deteriorates throughout the book


-4 sections in between serve to span intervening time gap


-contradictory organisation


@light-hearted diary in the beginning ͘ doom laden diary at the end


@heterosexual (ChapterSally Bowles) ͘ homosexual (Ch.Ruegen Island)


@underprivileged working-class family (Ch.The Nowaks) ͘ wealthy jewish


capitalists (Ch.The Landauers)


@jewish garden party ͘ Nazi takeover (quote "This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch. [...] I thought of our party [...] drinking our claret-cup while the gramophone played; and of that police- officer, revolver in hand, stumbling mortally wounded up the cinema steps to fall dead at the feet of a cardboard figure advertising a comic film.")


@light ( "The bus stopped. Otto and I were the last passengers to get out . We stood stretching ourselves and blinking at the bright snow out here in the country everything was dazzling white." ͘ dark ("her big dark eyes fastened on to mine like hooks; I could imagine I felt them pulling me down [...] all this was part of the long, rather sinister symbolic dream...")


-vacuum shown in the lives of people that make Nazi take-over possible (Frl Schröder and Frau Nowak s political ignorance)


-final Berlin Diary (Chapter VI )  political events now gain more and more importance in personal lives


-tragi-comic in the end "The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends [...] are in prison, possibly dead. [..] I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am horrified to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather. "


 funny and light, careless opening ; serious, thoughtful, politically inspired ending even with some of narrator s friends dying.


Metaphor and Important Scenes


Theatrical Metaphor "Playing"


-Sally Bowles plays at love When she informs "Christopher" that she is in love with Klaus, she at once adds "At least, I think I am".


-Otto Nowak plays at love, too. He leaves Peter, and later plays by pretending that Peter left him "please, never mention Peter s name to me again [...] Peter hurt me very much. I thought he was my friend. And then, suddenly, he left me all alone...".


-Rudi plays to be communist like his friends are ("Rudi s make-believe, story-book game has become earnest; the Nazis will play it with him.")


-When "Isherwood" first visits Troika, the entire place leaps into simulated life and gaiety as soon as a party of rich customers enter the page-boy s voice becomes "mocking, clear-pitched like an actor's , while the dancers showed "in their every movement a consciousness of the part they were playing". The entire performance is described in terms of a grotesque pantomime.


-The theatrical metaphor is extended as the novel progresses to embrace every aspect of Berlin. The communist bar near the zoo with its back-slapping waiter and conspiratorial costumers is "thoroughly sham and gay and jolly". Just as the Nazi demonstration on the Bülowplatz and the counter-demonstration by the inhabitants "was too much like a naughty schoolboy s game to be seriously alarming"


-Vivid image of Berlin on eve of Hitler s putsch is of the Salome appropriately decorated to look like hell, where "stage lesbians", as part of the performance, imitate "the laughter of the damned" for the sake of their clientele.


-Metaphor of mental illness Peter Wilkinson has neuroses.


This metaphor is used to make a statement about German society at large.


Otto represents the best and the worst of Germany he has the health and vitality of an animal and on the other side he s selfish like an animal.


No one really takes the Nazis seriously enough that they are able to seize power at the climax of the book by staging what is a big coup de th âtre.


In fact most of the inhabitants of Berlin during these final anarchic years of the Weimar Republic are playing at living, playing with life very much in the way that the artist does


The lost characters in the novel have been playing at life for so long that finally they have become fatally separated from their impulse to live. (e.g. Bernhard Nowak)


Boxing-scene


Simulated boxing fights at a fair-ground. Audience believes in everything happening on stage, that fights are real. "The audience took the fights dead seriously, shouting encouragement to the fighters, and even quarrelling and betting amongst themselves on the results. Yet nearly all of them had been in the tent as long as I had, and stayed on after I had left. The political moral is certainly depressing these people could be made to believe in anybody "


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