Goodbye to Berlin

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Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 novel by English-American writer Christopher Isherwood set during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. The novel recounts Isherwood's 1929–1932 sojourn in Berlin as a pleasure-seeking British expatriate on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany. The work consists of a "series of sketches of disintegrating Berlin, its slums and nightclubs and comfortable villas, its odd maladapted types and its complacent burghers." Isherwood drew many plot details from factual events, and he based the novel's characters on actual persons. Jean Ross, a 19-year-old flapper who briefly shared lodgings with Isherwood, inspired Sally Bowles, one of the main characters in the novel. During Isherwood's time abroad in Germany, the young author witnessed the country's rapid political and social unraveling. He saw extreme "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right." Following the Enabling Act that cemented Hitler's power in March 1933, Isherwood fled Germany and returned to England. Afterwards, the Nazis shuttered Berlin's cabarets, and many of Isherwood's friends fled abroad or perished in concentration camps. These events served as the genesis for Isherwood's Berlin stories. The novel received positive reviews from critics and writers. Anne Margaret Angus praised Isherwood's mastery in conveying the despair of Berlin's denizens and "their hopeless clinging to the pleasures of the moment". She believed Isherwood skillfully evoked "the psychological and emotional hotbed which forced the growth of that incredible tree, 'national socialism'." George Orwell hailed the novel for its "brilliant sketches of a society in decay". "Reading such tales as this," Orwell wrote, "the thing that surprises one is not that Hitler came to power, but that he did not do so several years earlier." New Directions collected the 1939 novel together with Isherwood's 1935 novel,...