Isherwood’s Berlin is more than the sum of its monuments.Īn early mentor to poet W. As he immediately adds, ‘they are all so pompous, so very correct,’ qualities he clearly disdains. But this is not the Berlin in which Isherwood is interested. In grand international styles, copies of copies, they assert our dignity as a capital city-a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch nothing has been forgotten.’Īs Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr memorably said, ‘ plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose‘. ‘Berlin is a city with two centres,’ he writes, ‘the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings round the Unter Den Linden, carefully arranged. Auden (right) photographed by Carl Van Vechten, February 6, 1939
The soul of a city isn’t found in the symbols constructed by its dignitaries but in its very fabric, and it’s this that has led Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories – actually two short novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin – to become essential to all those who want to understand Germany’s capital a little better.Įighty years on, despite the devastation wrought upon the city by World War Two and its subsequent division, Isherwood’s Berlin remains identifiable to those tramping its streets from tourist destination to tourist destination.Ĭhristopher Isherwood (left) and W.H. Tourists gathering around London’s Trafalgar Square or Rome’s Trevi Fountain may feel that they have come face to face with a city’s history, but these are landmarks, nothing more, ignored by locals to whom they represent little. Little less than a century old, Christopher Isherwood’s classic book still sheds light on the city that’s its star…Īficionados of Slow Travel know that to get to the soul of a place you don’t necessarily have to explore its heart.
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