Isherwood's Berlin Stories

About Berlin Stories

Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) was a British-born American novelist whose Berlin Stories — Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) — are the most celebrated literary portrait of Weimar Germany in its final years. Isherwood lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933, teaching English lessons and participating in the city's famous gay subculture, and his narrator 'Christopher' moves through the cabarets, boarding houses, and political chaos of a city sliding toward catastrophe. 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking' is the most famous sentence in his work and established a template for the literary witness. The Sally Bowles section of Goodbye to Berlin became I Am a Camera (play, 1951) and then Cabaret (musical, 1966; film, 1972). Isherwood later wrote A Single Man (1964), his personal masterpiece — a gay English professor's single day in Los Angeles in 1962 — and the frank gay memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976), which revealed what the Berlin Stories had concealed about his own sexuality. He spent his adult life in California.