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Christopher Isherwood's Seductive Berlin PROOF User: 140617 Time: 09:19 - 04-08-2013 Region: SundayAdvance Edition: 1 THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 2013 TR 7 FOOTSTEPS GERMANY Isherwood’s Seductive Berlin Christopher Isherwood The writer was drawn to the freewheeling spirit of “the most decadent city in Eu- rope” in the early 1930s, soon to be extin- guished by the Nazis. By RACHEL B. DOYLE When Christopher Isherwood moved to Berlin in 1929, the 25-year-old British nov- elist could not quite bring himself to settle down in one place. At one point he changed addresses three times in three months. There was the room he could barely afford next to the former Institute for Sexual Research in leafy Tier- garten park. There was the cramped, leaky attic flat that he shared with a family of five in Kreuzberg. And there was the apartment around Kottbusser Tor, in those days a slum (now a night-life hub), where he was pleased to discover that he was the sole Englishman when he went to register with the police. “He liked to imagine himself as one of those mysterious wanderers who pene- trate the depths of a foreign land, disguise themselves in the dress and customs of its natives and die in unknown graves, envied PHOTOGRAPHS BY GORDON WELTERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; INSET, HENRY E. HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, SAN MARINO, CALIF. by their stay-at-home compatriots,” Isher- wood wrote of this period in “Christopher lived, with its pale yellow facade mounted next to a small piano shop and close to and His Kind,” his third-person memoir of with concrete lion heads — are mixed with charming businesses like Knopf Paul, the 1930s. uninspiring modern constructions. A fetish which sells buttons, including ones made Isherwood would not feel out of place in fashion workshop and a rare-book store from eucalyptus and deer horn, and a Berlin today, which is still a destination for share the ground floor of his former build- pharmacy called Zum Goldenen Einhorn the young and the creative. While fashions ing; across the street, visitors can choose (To the Golden Unicorn) with wooden cabi- may have changed, Isherwood’s work still between a kabbalah center and a speak- nets and porcelain jars. captures the essence of the German cap- easy-style cocktail bar, Stagger Lee, where Yet in Isherwood’s fiction, the area was ital, with its art collections stashed in for- one rings a brass doorbell to enter. Around a notorious place where the police regular- mer bunkers, and louche nightclubs hiding the corner there is a six-month-old 1920s- ly hunted for “wanted criminals or es- behind unmarked doors. themed cafe with musical performances caped reformatory boys.” Thrill-seeking The seductive excitement of Weimar-era named after Sally Bowles. visitors flocked there on weekends. “They Berlin — with its limitless sexual possibil- Still, Nollendorfstrasse doesn’t seem all discussed communism and Van Gogh and ities for the curious gay writer and parties that different from how the author de- the best restaurants. Some of them where dancers “swayed in partial-para- scribed it in the opening lines of “Goodbye seemed a little scared: perhaps they ex- lytic rhythms under a huge sunshade sus- to Berlin”: “From my window, the deep pected to be knifed in this den of thieves,” pended from the ceiling” — quickly in- solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the author wrote. spired Isherwood. He steeped himself in the lamps burn all day, under the shadow Isherwood’s genius was in fusing the the sordid and the refined, the red-light of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plas- private, often outré lives of the Berliners, bars and the villas, the decadence and the ter frontages embossed with scroll-work with the political events unfurling like a apprehension of a city whose freewheeling and heraldic devices.” blood-red banner. The brownshirts carry- spirit was about to be extinguished by The neighborhood, in the days when Ish- ing the swastika flag put an end to much of Nazi terror. “Here was the seething brew erwood was giving English lessons and the scene that defined his time in the city of history in the making,” the author wrote writing wry, detached stories in a front mer im Eldorado” (“Pantry in the Eldora- Top, the convivial scene at and hastened his departure. in his memoir. room of his apartment, was a thriving cen- do”), acknowledging that the room where Heile Welt (Perfect World), a “Boy bars of every sort were being raid- In December 1930, Isherwood finally set- ter of gay life, and remains so. Today it is transvestite performers once shimmied on bar on Motzstrasse 5 in Schö- ed, now, and many were shut down. No tled into an apartment, at Nollendorf- not uncommon to see men in leather pants stage is currently dedicated to vegetables. neberg, near where Christo- doubt the prudent ones were scared and strasse 17 in the Schöneberg district. The or shiny rubber boots or police costumes We went inside to inspect a small photo pher Isherwood lived from 1930 lying low, while the silly ones fluttered building was full of eccentrics who are now strolling around — there are numerous gallery next to the cash register that to 1933. Above, an advertise- around town exclaiming how sexy the known through their fictional incarnations shops selling just these items, and a hand- showed how the nightclub used to look — a ment, left, for the Gear store on Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms,” in novels like “The Last of Mr. Norris” ful of clubs where one is not allowed in un- two-story space with gilded ceilings, chan- Kalckreuthstrasse, one of the Isherwood wrote in “Christopher & His (1935) and “Goodbye to Berlin” (1939). He less one is clad in them. deliers, white tablecloths and art on the fetish shops nearby. The area is Kind.” lived there with Jean Ross, the model for Isherwood immersed himself in the walls. Mr. Nash, who began giving the tour still the thriving center of gay In May of 1933 the author left Berlin for a his most famous character, the capricious area’s night life; it provided fodder for the in 2011, said it was considered chic in Wei- life that it was in Isherwood’s peripatetic existence traveling around Eu- nightclub singer and aspiring actress Sally novel “Goodbye to Berlin,” which was mar-era heterosexual society to spend the day. rope for several years with his draft-evad- Bowles, who captivated him with her “air adapted into the 1966 musical and 1972 film evening there, just as tourists today line up ing German boyfriend, Heinz Nedder- of not caring a curse what people thought “Cabaret.” His apartment was a short dis- to dance with the shirtless leather daddies meyer. He returned to visit in 1952 between of her.” His landlady, Meta Thurau, in- tance from several iconic clubs, including at the techno temple Berghain in Frie- the war and the Wall, finding “smashed spired the character of Fräulein Schroeder, the Eldorado, known for its transvestite drichshain. buildings along that familiar street” — who, in Isherwood’s fiction, symbolized shows. There, customers could buy tokens In “Christopher and His Kind,” Isher- Nollendorfstrasse — and “house-fronts . the typical Berliner of the time. In dire eco- to exchange for dances with men and wood drolly described Berlin’s “dens of pitted by bomb fragments and eaten by de- nomic straits after World War I, and forced women in drag, then try to guess their pseudo-vice”: “Here, screaming boys in cay.” He never saw the city restored to the to take in lodgers, she was at first skeptical partners’ gender. Masks were available for drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in ONLINE: FOLLOWING ISHERWOOD familiar, welcoming and inspiring place he of Hitler. Eventually she adapted to pop- those who wished to protect their identi- dinner-jackets play-acted the high jinks of would likely find it today. Tours, guided and self-guided, ular sentiment, in which locals “thrilled ties. Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the on- Isherwood settled in Southern California and three retro bars in the city. with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like “He probably saw Marlene here,” said lookers and reassuring them that Berlin in 1939, but remained both exhilarated and nytimes.com/travel school-boys, because the Jews, their busi- Brendan Nash, a transplanted Londoner was still the most decadent city in Europe.” haunted by his time in the German capital. ness rivals, and the Marxists ... had been who gives “Isherwood’s Neighborhood” Many of the author’s main sources of in- “Always in the background was Berlin. It satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and tours. He was referring to Marlene Diet- spiration were the seedy “boy bars” that was calling me every night, and its voice the inflation, and were going to catch it.” rich, the glamorous actress born and he frequented in a canalside area of was the harsh sexy voice of the gramo- The street Isherwood called home for raised in the Schöneberg district. On a sun- Kreuzberg, especially one called the Cosy phone records,” he wrote in the 1962 novel, two and a half years was bombed during ny summer morning we were standing in Corner, on Zossener Strasse 7, which be- “Down There on a Visit.” “Berlin had af- World War II, and now the stately prewar front of an organic supermarket on Motz- came a model for the Alexander Casino in fected me like a party at the end of which I buildings — including the one where he strasse 24, where a sign read “Speisekam- “Goodbye to Berlin.” Today, that address is didn’t want to go home.” HEADS UP NEWARK New Accents in the Ironbound’s Cuisine flux of residents from Hoboken and even Caption tag with dummy text By MICHAEL T.
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