| Allison Vincent |
Cabaret plays at the Trylon Cinema from Monday, January 6th through Tuesday, January 7th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
So, firstly, this is how I feel/sound when I talk about Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera, and Cabaret:
I get weird, loud, and oddly academic, and there is a lot of red string. Here’s (in a nutshell) why:
- I’m morbidly fascinated with WWII and the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany.
- As a Queer woman, I’m immensely inspired by the burgeoning Gay Rights Movement that was happening in Weimar before the Nazis rose to power and deeply saddened by its swift devastation.
- As a theatre nerd, I just love a good musical that takes big risks with real, historical topics.
- I’m obsessed with Christopher Isherwood’s many representations of himself.
Christopher Isherwood is the kindly English gent who penned the original material that eventually became Cabaret. He started out as a struggling writer and recent immigrant to Berlin where he kept a diary. He eventually used that diary to write two novellas that he released in one book, Berlin Stories. The second novella, Goodbye to Berlin, made him famous. In Goodbye to Berlin, we meet Sally Bowles, hear about the seedy settings and bawdy behavior within Berlin’s cabaret scene, catch passing glimpses of Nazis, prostitutes, homosexuals, drinking, dancing, violence, and the restless ennui of the youthful generation trying to find their way in a badly bruised city still reeling from the impacts of WWI.
Although it is just a good story, what snagged my attention and has never really let go is that Goodbye to Berlin is a work of fiction, however, Christopher Isherwood is our protagonist. Isherwood fictionalized himself navigating the veiled escapades he himself went on in his very own diary. The book was such a hit, John Van Druten clinched the rights to adapt it to a stage play, I Am a Camera. Here again, there is a character named Christopher Isherwood. That play was successful in its day and spawned an equally successful screen adaptation. Then came Kander, Masteroff, and Ebb with a splashy, shocking new spin on Isherwood’s tale: musical theater. Here, Isherwood is transformed into Clifford Bradshaw (Bradshaw is one of his middle names). This 1966 stage version was a smash hit that led us to the 1972 film starring Joel Gray, Michael York, and Liza Minelli. Then, get this: Isherwood writes his autobiography and uses various names for himself to indicate what versions of himself he is commenting on–the past, the present, fictional, real, etc. WHEW!
I became so immersed with Isherwood and his many selves and interpretations of his self that I wrote about him and the thread of his diary to Cabaret for my senior thesis, which totals about fifty pages. Below, you will find an excerpt punched up for readability of the main reason I find Cabaret and all of its iterations so utterly fascinating, befuddling, and forever timely.
BUCKLE UP, DEAR READER!
Setting the Stage
When Christopher Isherwood left for Berlin on March 14th, 1929, the trip was only supposed to be a brief visit encouraged by his best friend and fellow badass writer, W. H. Auden. But while vacationing in Germany, Isherwood fell in love with the ideologies and freedom accessible in Berlin: “It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys” (Isherwood C & K 2). The emphasis Isherwood places on Berlin denotes its importance to him as an outlet for his desires as a young, gay man.
As Isherwood traveled about Europe from 1933 to 1939, Hitler and the Third Reich captured the majority within the Reichstag as well as the hearts and minds of the Volk, partly due to their promises of reviving the economy, which was in shambles after both Germany’s being held financially responsible for WWI and the 1929 stock market crash (Miller 112). In the Jewish community, Hitler found a scapegoat for all the global banking and stock crises. In those early days of the Reich, anti-semitism was the party’s main focus. Initially, Hitler had no negative statutes against homosexuality. Heinrich Himmler, on the other hand, felt that homosexuals were a plague of the Aryan race and served as one of the main architects for eradicating them from Nazi Germany (Miller 112). Despite the rising tide of anti-Semitism, homophobia, and tension in greater Germany, specifically Weimar Berlin, Isherwood made the trip.
Defining Forms and Frames
When sifting through the many layers that make up the life and stories of Christopher Isherwood, marking fact from fiction is a difficult task. In his autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood attempts to help his readers by using certain signifying markers for the various representations he has created for himself throughout the years. First, he purposefully inserts quotation marks around his name when describing the fictional narrator, “Christopher Isherwood,” of Goodbye to Berlin. He makes the distinction that “Isherwood” is not Isherwood, which is a mind fuck, to be sure. He marks the author as a separate entity from the narrator. This confusing establishment of different selves–the “fictional” and “factual,” the past and present–combined with the additional secondary adaptations of Christopher Isherwood as a character in the stage and film versions of both I am a Camera and Cabaret creates a collage rather than a photograph of a person. The adaptations also imply that the Isherwood writing his memoir has become an entirely different, or foreign, body from himself much like the camera capturing images in Goodbye to Berlin.
That speech about being a camera is one of the strongest and most iconic links between all the various versions of Isherwood’s story: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking” (Isherwood G to B 3). The “detached observer” description implies that, whatever happens in the novel, Isherwood is merely an observer. He never acts. But, naturally, the reader knows Isherwood takes action in the novel; otherwise, he would never have left his room. The denial of agency here is a literary strategy. A fear of blackmail and a desire for publication lie beneath this iconic metaphor of the camera acting as a preemptive defense of Isherwood’s time and lifestyle in Berlin. His self-censorship–the deletion of his homosexual relationships, the addition of bawdy character qualities in Sally (whose real name is Jean Ross), and the misrepresentation of time all allow him to fictionalize his past making it both marketable, free from controversy, and a fascinating collage of the past.
Although a work of fiction, Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin has become the entry point to Weimar–era Berlin and the homosexual social scene inherently associated with the time. Its most famous adaptation, Cabaret, has enjoyed great success and numerous revivals both on and off Broadway. While Isherwood’s novel is not the only work of its kind, it is far and away the most popular. This fictionalized approach allows the audience to better digest the slip from extreme liberalism to fascism through Isherwood’s detached narration. It also allows Isherwood himself to be more digestible as a character as the adaptations of himself become more and more sexually liberated (Kander and Ebb).
Isherwood left England for Germany looking to explore his sexuality, and he knew Berlin would be the place to find himself. The devastation the Nazis inflicted on the cabarets, culture, and population of Germany stopped all the artistic, social, and sexual revolutions the Weimar era had fostered. In many ways, Isherwood’s novel serves as a warning. Ultimately, Isherwood was forced to leave Berlin for fear of the oncoming war and persecution he and others of his “tribe” would face. It is ironic that the “detached observer” who so coyly leads the reader through the pages of Goodbye to Berlin ends his story reflecting on the false security of photographs:
I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather the trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very good photograph. No. Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened. . .” (Isherwood G to B 207)
As his story draws to a close, Isherwood sees an image of his face, which he tried adamantly to keep behind the camera lens, reflecting back at him. His last comparison, of Berlin appearing like a “very good photograph,” insinuates how a photograph might be doctored, appearances changed to achieve a certain effect. Isherwood’s closing metaphor represents the danger of detachment. To name something serves as a form of attachment. Naming indicates an association with a group or idea. Had Isherwood named himself as a homosexual in his writings, he might have stood as an activist for gay rights against the tyranny of the Nazi Party, but, instead, he remained silent and closeted until the 1976 publication of his memoirs. Even with his long silence, Christopher Isherwood remains a recognized figurehead of the GLBT community. And, although the novel is a work of fiction, Isherwood’s experiences in Berlin will be remembered and continue evolving through the various stage adaptations of Cabaret and I am a Camera.
Works Cited
“Christopher Isherwood Remembered: ‘Chris Always Loved Young Men, and I Was Certainly Young.’” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 Oct. 2010, www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/17/christopher-isherwood-don-bachardy-diaries. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
Green, Charles. “New Isherwood Biography an Insightful Read.” Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News, 27 July 2024, www.washingtonblade.com/2024/07/25/christopher-isherwood-inside-out-book-review/. Accessed 22 Dec. 2024.
Isherwood, Christopher. The Berlin Stories. New Directions Publishing Corp. New
York, NY: 1935
Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind. University of Minnesota Press.
Minneapolis, MN: 2001
Kander, John and Fred Ebb. Cabaret. Random House. New York, NY: 1973
Miller, Neil. Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present.
Vintage. New York, NY: 1995
Mizejewski, Linda. “Camp Among the Swastikas: Isherwood, Sally Bowles and ‘Good
Heter Stuff.’” Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader.
Ed. Fabio Cleto. University of Michigan Press. Ann Arbor, MI: 2001
R/IASIP on Reddit: On the Pod Today the Guys Said This Is the Most Memeed Sunny Moment, Do We Agree?, www.reddit.com/r/IASIP/comments/y6f08m/on_the_pod_today_the_guys_said_this_is_the_most/. Accessed 23 Dec. 2024.
Van Druten, John. I am a Camera. Dramatists Play Service. New York, NY: 1951
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon