Berlin Stories

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The Berlin Stories is a 1945 omnibus by English-American writer Christopher Isherwood, consisting of his two early novels Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939). Set in Jazz Age Berlin between 1930 and 1933 on the cusp of Adolf Hitler's ascent to power as Chancellor of Germany, Isherwood portrays the city during this chaotic interwar period as a carnival of debauchery and despair inhabited by desperate people who are unaware of the national catastrophe that awaits them. The first novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains, focuses on the misadventures of a smuggler, communist, and spy named Arthur Norris, a character based on Gerald Hamilton, an unscrupulous businessman known as "the wickedest man in Europe," whom Isherwood met in the Weimar Republic. The second novel, Goodbye to Berlin, recounts the travails of various Berlin denizens whose lives become directly or indirectly affected by the Nazis' rise to power. Isherwood based the character of Sally Bowles on teenage cabaret singer and flapper Jean Ross with whom he briefly shared lodgings in Berlin. Isherwood's Berlin tales inspired John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am a Camera, which in turn inspired the 1955 film I Am a Camera, as well as the 1966 stage musical and 1972 film version of Cabaret. The best-known character from the stories, Sally Bowles, took center stage in these adaptations, even though the character appears as the lead in only one short story in Goodbye to Berlin. Although The Berlin Stories secured Isherwood's reputation, the author denounced his writings after the collection's publication. In a 1956 essay, Isherwood lamented that he misunderstood the suffering of the people that he depicted, and he regretted depicting many persons as "monsters". In 2010, Time listed the collection as one of the 100 Best English-language works of the 20th century.