Berlin полностью

Fortunately for Isherwood, the working-class boys who frequented the Cozy Corner were not interested in masquerades. Here he met his first “blue-eyed German boy,” Bubi. “By embracing Bubi,” Isherwood wrote, “Christopher could hold in his arms the whole mystery-magic of foreignness, Germanness. By means of Bubi, he could fall in love with and possess the entire nation.” He took Bubi to restaurants, the zoo, and to movies like Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia and G. W. Pabst’s Pandoras Box based on the play by Frank Wedekind. Perhaps inevitably, however, Bubi turned out to be not so possessable after all: just another proletarian kid on the make. Moreover, he was not German at all, but Czech.

Again following Auden, Isherwood made a pilgrimage to Hirschfeld’s Sex Institute. He giggled nervously at the high-heeled boots for fetishists, the lacy panties designed for big-crotched Prussian officers, and the trouser legs cut off at the knees and equipped with elastic bands that allowed their wearer to go about town with nothing on but them and an overcoat—perfect for “giving a camera-quick exposure when a suitable viewer appeared.” Though somewhat embarrassed by all this, and by the “patients” under Hirschfeld’s care, he was forced to admit “a kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs.” The “decadence” of Berlin may have been in part a commercial put-on, but there was enough of the genuine article for Isherwood to experience the kind of inner-liberation he could never have managed back home in England.

However enticing Isherwood may have found Berlin’s homosexual scene, he was drawn to the city not only by his need for sexual emancipation, but also by the desire to make a gesture of defiance against his native country, which he had come to see as insufferably insular. In the eyes of most Britons, Germany was still the enemy, Berlin the capital of the Huns. Isherwood’s father had been killed in the war by the Germans, the very people with whom the son was now choosing to live. By decamping for Berlin, the young writer found the perfect way to cut the strings to family and fatherland.

Another motive for his move to Berlin was his belief that the city would provide a stimulating environment for his work. Like Auden, Isherwood was a serious artist (albeit not so gifted), and he spent considerably less time chasing boys than sitting at his writing table. A telling scene in Christopher and His Kind has him leaving a party early in order to be fresh for writing the next morning. “Seldom have wild oats been sown so prudently,” he admitted.

The sensibility that Isherwood brought to his work was increasingly shaped by the sociopolitical ambiance of the Spree metropolis as it slipped into depression and chaos. “Here was the seething brew of history in the making—a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books,” he wrote later. “The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”

Having decided in 1929 to stay on in Berlin, Isherwood moved with one of his lovers to a dingy flat near the Hallesches Tor. Visiting him there in the summer of 1930, Stephen Spender found him living very frugally, eating horse meat and lung soup. After moving briefly to another slum near Kottbuser Tor, Isherwood found more lasting quarters in a flat at Nollendorfstrasse 17. This was middle-class shabby as opposed to slum-shabby. A description of it can be found in his novel, Goodbye to Berlin:

From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.