Goodbye to Berlin Study Guide

Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904 in the United Kingdom. His father, a member of the military, was killed in World War I. His mother was a member of the wealthy Greene family. After finishing school, Christopher attended Cambridge University to study history. However, he was asked to leave after writing only jokes on his exams. In 1925, Christopher reconnected with a prep school friend, the famous author W.H. Auden. The two become close friends. Isherwood published his first novel, All the Conspirators, in 1928. After a failed stint in medical school, Isherwood visited Auden in Berlin in 1929. There, he enjoyed the liberal attitudes toward homosexuality (Isherwood himself was gay). Isherwood eventually moved to Berlin in 1930, and there he published his second novel, The Memorial, and wrote the stories that make up Goodbye to Berlin. While in Berlin, Isherwood began a relationship with the 17-year-old Heinz Neddermayer. Together, they fled Nazi Germany and traveled around looking for a new citizenship for Neddermayer. Neddermayer was called back to Germany, arrested, and sentenced to serve time in a labor camp. During that period, Isherwood lived in Luxembourg and collaborated with Auden on writing. In 1939, Isherwood emigrated to the United States. He became an American citizen in 1946. In 1953, 48-year-old Isherwood met 18-year-old Don Bachardy. They stayed together until Isherwood’s death in 1986. Over the course of his life, Isherwood wrote and collaborated on over 40 books, plays, and films.

Goodbye to Berlin depicts Berlin from 1930–1933, during the fall of the Weimer Republic and rise of Adolf Hitler’s fascist Nazi government. Throughout the novel, Isherwood recounts rising extremism and factionalism as Berliners deal with the hyperinflation Germany experienced following World War I. This inflation resulted from the war debt that Germany owed, as well as the reparations that the Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to pay. Because of this extreme inflation, much of the German population endured poverty. This poverty led to extremism for many Germans, fueling the popularity of Hitler’s Nazi party which promised to restore Germany to its former economic glory. By the end of the novel, Isherwood witnesses the Nazi’s strict policies against Jews and Communists, setting the stage for the disaster of the Holocaust and World War II.

While Goodbye to Berlin is a fictionalized account of Isherwood’s time in Germany, Isherwood’s 1976 memoir Christopher and His Kind expounds on his life during that period of time, detailing more of his personal life as a gay man in Berlin. Isherwood also collaborated with W.H. Auden on a series of three plays, the first of which is The Dog Beneath the Skin.  For readers interested in a history of the Weimar Republic that Isherwood depicts, The Weimer Republic: Promise and Tragedy by Eric Weitz offers a comprehensive view of the period. In addition, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the most famous novels to emerge from Weimer-era Berlin and is also a key work of literary modernism.