Book report: Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood


 

Late Saturday evening (more like early Sunday morning, to be precise), I finished reading Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood. The book starts as a somewhat breezy, lighthearted collection of character sketches featuring the oddball and eccentric characters Isherwood (or "Issyvoo," as his landlady Frl. Schroeder refers to him) encounters as an English tutor/aspiring writer in Weimar Berlin. 200 pages later, it concludes ominously with the dark cloud of fascism enveloping Germany. What I particularly appreciated is its boots-on-the-ground reportage of the gradual decay of Germany in the early 1930s. Isherwood wrote this as Hitler was coming to power. We see Isherwood transform from passive observer to horrified chronicler. This book is a cautionary tale of how evil and hideous political movements can quietly take hold.

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