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In the early 1930s, Christopher Isherwood went to Berlin to work as an English teacher. During his stay, he taught English to various people from different parts of society. He also met people of quite different occupations and this paved the way to the variety of the characters in his 1939 autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin. This novel depicts the life of Berliners between 1930-33, which witnessed the fall of Weimar Republic along with the decline in freedom and the rise of Nazism and suppression. In his novel, Isherwood has used the “camera eye” technique with his namesake narrator “Christopher Isherwood”, and in this way, he has managed to observe Berlin without much intervention.
His narration also enabled him to create a filmic effect. In his article “The Art of Fiction”, Henry James suggests that, “The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle or the needle without the thread.” Throughout the novel, Isherwood touches upon different social, political and economic issues in the Berlin of early 1930s, and his content actually corresponds to his form. This paper initially aims to give an overview of the motivations behind the novel and its camera-like narration. Following this introduction, the paper will analyze the correspondence between the form and the content of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, considering its formal qualities, camera-like narration and socio-political context.
Berlin in 1930s
Between 1919 and 1933, Germany under the unofficial Weimar Republic was a center of creativity, art and science. This period was regarded as the “golden years” of Germany. In those days, Berlin was an attraction for intellectuals. However, Germany faced a concurrent economic and political turmoil after the WWI and the 1929 Wall Street stock market crash. Resentment against the harsh treaty conditions after the WWI, hyperinflation, poverty and instability were followed by the illusionary and extremist policies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. People of this social decadence were highly influenced by the promises of Hitler. As Sophie Melissa Smith states in her article, Isherwood went to Berlin in early 1930s on “a voyage of self discovery” and found himself in the middle of the fall of progressive Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazism, accompanied by the constant street fights between the Nazis and Communists. Smith further refers to another article by Tamás Tukacs stating that Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin chronicles the political condition of Germany and its impacts on the population, which actually “serves as ‘gesture of commitment to a loss rather than its cure’, but one that nevertheless acts as a record, so that events become ‘developed, carefully printed, fixed’ for posterity.”
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The undesirable experiences of Jewish community, as an inseparable outcome of Nazism are also reflected in Isherwood’s work. In Bernhard’s party, the narrator Christopher Isherwood hints their inevitable suffering that would come along with the rise of Nazis:
“However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch.”
As he ends the novel with the advance of Nazis in 1933, he leaves Berlin and goes to his homeland, Britain. Eventually when he returned to Berlin in 1952, he could not help but wonder:
“Hadn’t there been something youthfully heartless in my enjoyment of the spectacle of Berlin in the early thirties, with its poverty, its political hatred and its despair?”
English Literature in 1930s
As the WWII drew closer, writers started to question the aesthetic motivations of modernism and adapt a more realist approach. Although they acknowledged the earlier writers such as Woolf, Eliot, Conrad or Joyce as their masters, the world was changing and so were the priorities of literature. They began to challenge the role of modernism in the world of economic and political disorder. In his article “Late Modernism: British Literature at Midcentury”, Thomas S. Davis refers to Isherwood’s memoir Christopher and His Kind as in the following:
“In his memoir Christopher and His Kind, Isherwood recalls one instance when the realities of class and economic inequality tarnished modernism’s luster. ‘After he and Stephen had been to see Kameradschaft, Pabst’s film about the coal miners, in 1931, Christopher told Stephen that, when the tunnel caved in and the miners were trapped, he had thought: ‘That makes Virginia Woolf look pretty silly.’ Stephen replied that he had been thinking something similar, though not specifically about Virginia.’’’
It is quite obvious that the modern writers were not refusing the previous tradition. They were only trying to draw attention on the social issues, rather than the individual, or as Woolf calls it “an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.” Davis further argues that the “‘introverted novels’ gave far more attention to the textures and modes of subjective experience than the events that occasioned them. For Isherwood and his contemporaries, the task was to plot modernism more firmly in the social and political sphere.”
He also touches upon another significant trait of modernism, which is the “representation of foreign (diverse) languages and cultures” in the course of travel or exile. He states that Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin reflects such an attempt and makes the lowest and highest classes of the German society accessible to the reader. According to Davis, “Christopher Isherwood himself fitted the part of the modern expatriate: after living in Germany from 1929 to 1933, he embarked on a life of wandering until the beginning of World War II, before settling definitively in the United States.”
Autobiographical Novel and Camera-like Narration
Autobiography or Autobiographical Novel?
An autobiography gives the full and exact chronology of a person’s life while an autobiographical novel combines autobiographical and fictive elements. In this sense, Goodbye to Berlin can be regarded as an autobiographical novel.
Isherwood makes a similar explanation in his preface and suggests that, “Because I have given my own name to the ‘I’ of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libelously exact portraits of living persons. ‘Christopher Isherwood’ is a convenient ventriloquist’s dummy, nothing more.” Isherwood here takes an impersonal stance and emphasizes that his book is not completely an autobiographical work.
Similarly, Rose Kamel comments on Isherwood’s narrative in her article, likening him to a chameleon. She states that, “He was both the self effacating narrator viewing history with the purported objectivity of a camera eye and a fictional character leading a picaresque existence.’ She emphasizes that, his work is “all part of an autobiography.”
Another scholar, Rebecca Gordon Stewart refers to Isherwood’s form as his “literary process of self-construction.” In her article, she mentions that Isherwood achieves to mix fact and fiction by blurring the precision and in a sense, the reliability of narrator.
Stephen Wade amplifies her claims and states that, “As his writing life continued, he [Isherwood] always used fiction as an alternative to autobiography for the judgment of experience, and always at the centre of his fiction is the Isherwood surrogate who has grown imaginatively from the original thoughts and events of diary notes. His interviews always suggest the closeness of diary and fiction; and of course his recent autobiographical works have had diaries as source material.”
In a similar vein, the author of Christopher Isherwood’s biography Peter Parker notes that, “Isherwood liked to imagine himself his own creation and he was quite prepared to rewrite history in order to improve on the facts for aesthetic or personal reasons.”
Considering all these remarks, it is inevitable to call Goodbye to Berlin an autobiographical novel, where Isherwood recreates the autobiographical facts by using a namesake narrator whose real and unreal experiences ultimately construct an identity for him.
Camera-like Narration
In 1930s, inclination towards fragmentation in plot affected the literary preferences. As a result, writers adopted many techniques from the film industry. These tendencies also shaped Isherwood’s camera-like narration, which is a prominent feature of his style. This type of narrator might have a first person or/and a third person point of view. While the third person narrator is objective, the first person narrator tends to be subjective. Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin utilizes both of the narrators.
Isherwood opens his novel Goodbye to Berlin as in the following:
“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”
This opening passage has been much debated by scholars. Although some of them claim that this passage directly suggests the objectivity of the narrator, other scholars refuse this and assert that even if this passage places the narrator into an impersonal stance, the last sentence of this paragraph reveals the real intention of Isherwood. According to R. Fountain Eames, Isherwood here implies “mediation” through his namesake narrator Christopher Isherwood. She states that “although the scenes may be experienced by Christopher in a way that is initially passive, the record ‘will have to be’ subject to an editing process. In order to ‘fix’ experience, a writer must necessarily cast it in his own perspective and in doing so he ‘carefully’ shapes its meaning.”
During an interview, Isherwood similarly explains that his use of “camera eye” has been very much misunderstood.
“This business about being a camera is very misleading. As I’ve often had occasion to point out, what I really meant by saying, ‘I am a camera,’ was not I am a camera all the time, and that I’m like a camera. It was: I’m in the strangest mood at this particular moment . . . I just sit and register impressions through the window- visual data- without any reaction to it, like a camera. The idea that I was a person divorced from what was going on around me is quite false.”
As he clearly puts forward, what he records is not only what he sees; he “registers impressions”, which includes subjectivity in itself. He emphasizes his partial passivity saying that he was not totally “divorced from” the outside; he was just not reacting to it. This mood can be realized throughout the novel. In fact, his camera-like narration that provides him such passivity also reflects the mood of Berliners towards the changing city and political atmosphere in the early 1930s.
On the other hand, the film making aspect of his narration hints his involvement in storytelling. Every story is shaped by its teller, in other words, every film creates a new world. As Isherwood creates a new world, he also takes a journey into his inner self. He actually confesses that using his own name Christopher Isherwood as his namesake “gave him inhibitions” since it made him “more self-conscious” than he would admit. Therefore, with “camera eye” metaphor, he manages to break the boundaries. He states that, “I felt myself responsible for whatever Christopher said or did (even if it was fictitious) and so I tended, without knowing it, to hold him back from mixing too freely in the action of the story and thereby compromising me.” This actually relates to Rebecca Gordon Stewart’s article where she says, “The desire to construct an identity in literature as a represented process of self-understanding became a focus for Isherwood.” In this sense, through the eyes of his camera Isherwood does not only observe the outside world, but also his inner world.
The Form as the Content
In his novel Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood uses diaries and observations of his stay in Berlin in the early 1930s. He inevitably reflects the socio-political conditions of Berliners and Berlin. As its primary objective, this paper aims to discuss the correspondence of form and content, analyzing certain parts of Isherwood’s text. In fact, such a correspondence is crucial to achieve since it will yield the most coherent and meaningful outcome, as Mark Schorer states in his article “Technique as Discovery”. He explains that:
“Modern criticism, through its exacting scrutiny of literary texts, has demonstrated with finality that in art beauty and truth are indivisible and one. The Keatsian overtones of these terms are mitigated and an old dilemma solved if for beauty we substitute form, and for truth, content. We may, without risk of loss, narrow them even more, and speak of technique and subject matter. Modern criticism has shown us that to speak of content as such is not to speak of art at all, but of experience; and that it is only when we speak of the achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as critics. The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique. …And surely it follows that certain techniques are sharper tools than others, and will discover more; that the writer capable of the most exacting technical scrutiny of his subject matter, will produce works with the most satisfying content, works with thickness and resonance, works with reverberate, works with maximum meaning.”
As Schorer explains, form and content are inseparable elements of a text; however, what makes them separately visible is the author’s technique. Investigating the correspondence of form and content will provide the technique and meaning of the author. In Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood has certain formal qualities that reflect the content of his text. These are his fragmented plot, camera-like narration, use of imageries, characterization and emphasis on language. Using them, he depicts the general mood and mindset of the Berliners as well as his own stance towards the socio-political events. In his article, David P. Thomas refers to George Wickes’s remarks on Isherwood’s technique. Wickes states that in Goodbye to Berlin Isherwood ‘perfected his technique of observing through a dispassionate narrator bearing his own name’ using the camera eye. In this sense, it would be best to begin the scrutiny of correspondence from Isherwood’s plot and narration.
Isherwood’s plot has a fragmented structure. There occur many spontaneous narrator shifts during the novel. In this way, Isherwood creates an effect of lap dissolve between the scenes, which reminds the reader of a movie. At the beginning of the novel, as Isherwood introduces the scene and his landlady to the reader, there is an apparent narrator shift. As the narrator Christopher Isherwood is describing Frl. Schroeder, the narrator suddenly becomes the landlady herself:
“She has dark, bright, inquisitive eyes and pretty waved brown hair of which she is proud. She must be about fifty-five years old. Long ago, before the War and the Inflation, she used to be comparatively well off. She went to the Baltic for her summer holidays and kept a maid to do the housework. For the last thirty years she has lived here and taken in lodgers. She started doing it because she liked to have company.
‘‘Lina,’ my friends used to say to me, ‘however can you? How can you bear to have strange people living in your rooms and spoiling your furniture, especially when you’ve got the money to be independent?’ And I’d always give them the same answer. ‘My lodgers aren’t lodgers,’ I used to say. ‘They’re my guests.”
As it can be clearly seen the third person narrator
