Recommendations
Books Like The Berlin Stories
Best books to read after The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories are the defining literary portrait of Weimar Germany — Sally Bowles, the Kit Kat Klub, the rise of the Nazis through the eyes of a camera-narrator. These recommendations share its portrait of a decadent society in the last moments before catastrophe, its European setting, or its place in the tradition of witness literature.
- 1Buy
A Single Man
by Christopher Isherwood
Isherwood's personal masterpiece — a gay English professor's single day in 1962 Los Angeles, more formally precise than the Berlin Stories and his own most admired work.
- 2Buy
Christopher and His Kind
by Christopher Isherwood
The frank memoir — what the Berlin Stories concealed about Isherwood's own gay relationships, the real story behind the camera-narrator, essential for the full picture.
- 3Buy
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
The companion European novel — Hans Castorp in the Swiss sanatorium as the same pre-Nazi European civilization reaches its crisis, the intellectual background to the world the Berlin Stories observe.
- 4Buy
Berlin Alexanderplatz
by Alfred Döblin
The contemporary German novel of Berlin — Franz Biberkopf, Weimar Berlin's streets and crime, the Expressionist version of the same city Isherwood documented.
- 5Buy
Suite Française
by Irène Némirovsky
Written during the German occupation of France — the same society at the moment of catastrophe, witnessed by a woman who would be killed in Auschwitz before she finished the novel.
- 6Buy
The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
The German postwar generation's reckoning — the moral and psychological aftermath of the society the Berlin Stories describe in its last years of tolerance.
- 7Buy
Atonement
by Ian McEwan
The English domestic novel that ends in the same war — Briony's 1935 lie, the same prewar European world about to be destroyed, McEwan's most historically grounded novel.
- 8Buy
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Three women across time — one in 1920s London, which is the literary world that produced Isherwood, the novel that most directly inherits the Virginia Woolf tradition he came from.
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