Isherwood's Berlin Stories Reading Order

Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories — comprising Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) — are the most celebrated literary portrait of Weimar Germany in its last years: the decadent, desperate, politically chaotic Berlin of 1930–1933, which Isherwood witnessed firsthand as a young Englishman teaching private English lessons and living with his German lover. The narrator, Christopher (not quite Isherwood but his literary avatar), moves through the cabarets, boarding houses, and social circles of Berlin as the Nazis rise to power — encountering Sally Bowles, the English girl with theatrical ambitions and chaotic personal life; the communist fighter Natalia Landauer; the sleazy confidence man Arthur Norris; and a cast of characters whose vivid particularity makes the political catastrophe human. 'I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking' — the famous opening of the Sally Bowles section — describes the narrator's stance and established a template for a kind of literary witness that made Isherwood one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. John van Druten's adaptation Sally Bowles became the musical Cabaret (1966), one of Broadway's greatest works.