Response to Goodbye To Berlin
"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking" (Isherwood 1). This phrase comes from the first page of Christopher Isherwood's most popular documentary styled novel, Goodbye to Berlin (1939). In this novel, Isherwood managed to establish a sort of "matter-of-fact" style by blending fact and fiction and achieving a naive, honest style for the narrator. "The phrase "I am a camera" often appears in his work indicating his belief that a narrator should serve the role of a simple recording device" (Caudwell 2). By achieving this, Isherwood provides the readers with an unsurpassed portrait of Berlin, a city in the process of internal decay, in the turbulent years of Hitler's rise in power. "It is as if...Isherwood is masquerading "as a war correspondent..." (Piazza 2). Isherwood is the outsider looking in, observing a war (holocaust) in which he is not involved; but he does show glimpses and portraits of characters that have been affected by it. "He immerses himself in the world of prostitutes, living almost anonymously in shabbily genteel and working class areas of the city and translating his experience of the demimonde image of what would eventually become the defi
"Isherwood, Christopher" Contemporary Literary Criticism. "Your friend Peter is very generous and very meaning, but he makes a great mistake. You can get used to anything" (Isherwood 3). These boys ought to be put in labour-camps" (Isherwood 89). The Nazis eliminated Bernard along with their business by taking it over. The brooding specter of Nazism hovers in the background, finally to impinge even on characters as indifferent to politics as the landlady Fraulin Schroeder and the innocently naughty cabaret singer Sally Bowles. It's described almost as a getaway place from the world's war-like ways. Each one is effected in their own sort of way by this dramatic political change in the city of Berlin. This statement proves to be true about all the characters, from the major to minor. The next child introduced is Grete, an overweight 12 year-old spoiled girl who tended to do a lot of singing, eating, and siting in the chair.
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