Читаем Berlin полностью

It was here that Isherwood encountered the figures who would populate his fiction. His landlady was a Fräulein Thurau, who had been ruined in the inflation and was desperate to keep up appearances. As Fräulein Lina Schroeder in the Berlin novels, she waddles about her domain in “a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her lodgers.” Fond of complaining about the depravity of Berlin, she in fact is nearly unshockable. “How sweet love must be!” she sighs, after listening to “Herr Issyvoo” and one of his boys cavort in the next room. A fellow lodger and English expatriate named Jean Ross served as the model for Sally Bowles, the sometime actress and chanteuse for whom “Life is just a Cabaret, old chum.” (The name Bowles, incidentally, was borrowed from the American writer Paul Bowles, who paid a brief visit to Isherwood in 1931. Bowles found Berlin “architecturally hideous,” “seething with hatred,” and, withal, “the least amusing place I have ever seen, a synonym for stupidity”) Jean Ross, like so many “modern” young women in Weimar Berlin, was determined to burn the candle at both ends even when she lacked the money for candle or matches. She boasted of her many lovers and claimed that she actually made love every night on stage with her partner in a production of Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann. Isherwood, failing to verify this claim with binoculars, believed that it was nothing but braggadocio. The model for “Mr. Norris” was another classic demimonde character: one Gerald Hamilton. On the surface a respectable representative for the London Times, Hamilton was in reality an enterprising go-between who fenced stolen paintings, smuggled contraband weapons, and made secret deals with the police. Like Jean Ross, Hamilton ran up bills and bragged incessantly about the titled people he had known, the castles he had visited, the great meals he had consumed. In fact, his major accomplishment was avoiding falling afoul of the Nazis and the Communists, both of whom he served.

Isherwood’s works provide a reasonably accurate record of late Weimar Berlin because the frivolity depicted therein masks desperate efforts by the central characters to stay afloat in a sea of trouble. The undercurrent of anxiety and fear was hardly misplaced, for the Great Depression was in its opening phase, and Hitler was on his final march to the gates of power. Recalling those grim days in his memoir World within World, Isherwood’s friend Stephen Spender was anything but nostalgic:

In this Berlin, the agitation, the propaganda, witnessed by us in the streets and cafés, seemed more and more to represent the whole life of the town, as though there were almost no privacy behind doors. Berlin was the tension, the poverty, the anger, the prostitution, the hope and despair thrown out on the streets. It was the blatant rich at the smart restaurants, the prostitutes in army top boots at corners, the grim, submerged-looking Communists in processions, and the violent youths who suddenly emerged from nowhere into the Wittembergplatz and shouted: ’DeutschlandErwache!’

A Touch of Panic

“Let’s hope 1929 brings us plenty of struggle, friction, and sparks,” wrote the left-wing playwright Friedrich Wolf in late 1928. Wolf got his wish: 1929, of course, was the year of the great stock crash on Wall Street, which had devastating consequences for Germany and Berlin. But 1929 had generated plenty of “sparks” in Berlin even before the October financial fire in New York leaped across the Atlantic to do its damage in Europe. Looking back, we can see that it was the beginning of the end for Weimar democracy.