Elliot Douglas explores Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin…and discovers some pandemic-related parallels.
I doubt Berlin would have registered on my radar so early if it wasn’t for Christopher Isherwood. More specifically, it was Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret, starring Liza Minelli and loosely inspired by Isherwood’s writings, that I watched, enraptured, as a closeted teenager in rural Scotland.
For longer than I care to admit, the outlandish dancers, dirty Berlin nightclub where the illicit gay subplot plays out, and Liza’s contralto vibrato belting out “Maybe This Time” were more closely connected in my mind to the aesthetics of the German capital than the city itself.
Like me, Isherwood came to Berlin as a writer at the age of 25 (Liza was also 25 at the time of filming). Like me, he was a gay Brit who came to embrace his sexuality in one of the world’s queerest cities (“Berlin meant boys,” as he wrote in his memoir). And while it would be a stretch to compare our contemporary Covid-ridden capital to the sinister events of late-Weimar-era Berlin, there are certainly some similarities in the current blend of economic depression, political turmoil and social restrictions.
In any case, taken with the idea of being a latter-day Issyvoo, I decided to seek out some of the places he lived and spent time in, to try and gain more insight into his life. Despite the conflicts and contradictions between his two famous novels set in Berlin, Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935)—both inspired by his time here but with altered names and details to hide his homosexuality—and his “frank and factual” memoir, Christopher and His Kind, written forty years later, following his Berlin trail proved fairly straightforward. It also helped shine a light on the long and fascinating history of queer culture in the city.