Isherwood wrote in 1976 that, "in real life, Jean and Christopher had a relationship which was asexual but more truly intimate than the relationships between Sally and her various partners in the novel, the plays and the films". [57]

The Berlin Stories - Wikipedia The Berlin Stories - Wikipedia

Frl. Schroeder [the landlady] is consolable... It's no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about ' Der Fuhrer'... If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted Communist, she would probably deny it... Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatising themselves.

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It is to this idyllic and beautiful island that Christopher comes in the summer of 1931 to work on his novel. He’s sharing a holiday house with two others, an Englishman named Peter Wilkinson, about his own age and a German working-class boy from Berlin named Otto Nowak, aged sixteen or seventeen years old. Van Druten, John (1983). I Am a Camera: A Play in Three Acts. United Kingdom: Dramatists Play Service. ISBN 978-0-8222-0545-6– via Internet Archive. Moss 1979: Isherwood frequented "the boy-bars in Berlin in the late years of the Weimar Republic.... [He] discovered a world utterly different from the repressive English one he disliked, and with it, the excitements of sex and new subject matter." Ross] never liked Goodbye to Berlin, nor felt any sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles, which in many respects she thought more closely modeled on one of Isherwood's male friends.... She never cared enough, however, to be moved to any public rebuttal. She did from time to time settle down conscientiously to write a letter, intending to explain to Isherwood the ways in which she thought he had misunderstood her; but it seldom progressed beyond 'Dear Christopher.'"

of personal reaction, except insofar as the mere angle at

The other stories are less interesting, only because there is no Sally Bowles. We do get to see the Berlin of the time and the rise of the Nazis, as in Mr. Norris Changes Trains. Indeed, we see both sides of the coin. In one story, Isherwood, who is temporarily broke, stays with the Nowaks, a not very well-off family. The father is a drunk, the younger brother, whom Isherwood had met in a previous story as a hustler, is lazy and always feeling sorry for himself and Frau Nowak ends up in the sanatorium. The other side concerns his friends, the Landauers. They are a rich Jewish family that owns a successful department store. Isherwood has a letter of introduction to them but does not use it, till Fräulein Schroeder makes a gratuitous anti-Semitic remark. He becomes friends with them, particularly the daughter, Natalia, a gracious and shy young woman, and Bernhard, the nephew and manager of the store. Not only do we follow the relationship between Isherwood and the two Landauers but we also see the rise of the Nazis and what that means for the Landauers. It is not, of course, good. Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world. W. H. Auden W. H. Auden in a letter to Patience McElwee 31 December 1928 (British Library Add 59618).

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Christopher’s thoughts and reactions are not recorded, we are left to imagine them and it is a complex imagining because theirs was a complex and strange relationship. Berlin diary (winter 1932-3) Isherwood, Christopher (1962). Down There on a Visit. New York City: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-8166-3367-8– via Internet Archive. I went to my father and asked him, 'What can you tell me about Thirties' glamour? Should I be emulating Marlene Dietrich or something?' And he said 'No, study everything you can about Louise Brooks.'" [57] Now, about a hundred years since those days, and as the father of a teenage daughter the same age as Sally, I can see her behaviour as nerves and self-consciousness and an endless fishing for compliments and reassurance. I see her as pathetic and in need of help. Bowles 1985, p.110: In his autobiography Without Stopping, the author Paul Bowles surmised that Isherwood, whom he met in Berlin, borrowed his surname for the character Sally Bowles.