It was precisely those aspects of the cosmopolitan metropolis most despised by the Nazis—homosexuality, avant-garde art, left-wing politics, jazz, lascivious cabaret— which at the end of the decade drew in a pair of young English writers, W. H. Au-den and Christopher Isherwood, to the German capital. Both found Berlin simultaneously liberating and depressing. Isherwood would later provide a detailed record of this experience in his famous Berlin novels, Mr. Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, which served as the basis for the play I am a Camera and the musical and movie Cabaret. Like so many chronicles of late Weimar Berlin, these works evoke an atmosphere of impending doom, of dancing-on-the-volcano.
Auden was the first to come; he arrived in October 1928 and stayed for ten months. Anxious to escape the “immense bat-shadow of home,” he had initially gone to Paris, expecting to spend a full year there. However, he quickly found the French capital too predictable: nothing but (as he put it) “bedroom mirrors and bidets, lingerie and adultery, the sniggers of schoolboys and grubby old men.” Wanting something fresh, and believing that aspiring writers should suffer, he decamped for “the much grimmer and disturbing uncertain world of Berlin.” Discomfort was hardly Berlin’s only attraction. As he excitedly observed: “Berlin is a bugger’s daydream. There are 170 male brothels under police control.” One of his first stops was Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research, which maintained an extensive collection of sexual-stimulation devices. Auden was not particularly titillated by this example of Teutonic scholarship, which he dismissed as “a eunuch’s pleasure.” More genuinely pleasurable were the dozens of gay bars, especially the Cozy Corner in the working-class Hallesches Tor district. John Layard, an English friend of Auden’s who also lived in Berlin, described this place as “a very small café, rather scruffy, in which there were always half a dozen boys hanging around drinking beer.” Another Englishman, John Lehmann, found the Cozy Corner to be “filled with attractive boys of any age between sixteen and twenty-one . . . all dressed in extremely short lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs to delectable advantage.” When Lehmann excused himself to go to the lavatory, he “was followed in by several boys, who, as if by chance, ranged themselves on either side of me and pulled out their cocks rather to show them off than to relieve nature as I was doing.” As Lehmann’s experience suggests, most of the boys at the Corner were a little rough around the edges, which suited Auden just fine. “Wystan liked being beaten up a bit,” wrote Layard. “It would start with pillow-fights and end with blows; then they would go to bed together.” Auden himself bragged that one of his boys, whom he described as “a cross between a rugger hearty and Josephine Baker,” left him a “mass of bruises.”
W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender, 1930
Berlin for Auden meant not just hard living but also hard thinking—an intellectual as well as carnal liberation. He learned, he claimed, that the traditional wisdom that goodness yields happiness was a dangerous inversion of the truth. “Be happy and you will be good” was his new (equally dubious) motto. Accordingly, most of the poems that he composed during his Berlin days—verses like “From scars where kestrels hover,” “Love by ambition,” and “Before this loved one”—deal less with the city per se than with the dangers of self-repression and the challenges of love. But he could not help but take notice of the charged political milieu in which he found himself. One of his Berlin-period poems speaks of a young proletarian girl shot through the knees by the police. Another alludes to a fierce battle on May Day 1929 between Communists and the police that left twenty-three people dead in the streets: “All this time was anxiety at night / Shooting and barricades in the street.” Later, Auden understood that Berlin had made him politically aware for the first time in his life: “One suddenly realized that the whole foundations of life were shaking.”
In early 1929 Auden invited his school friend Christopher Isherwood to visit him in Berlin. Isherwood accepted and ended up staying in the German capital, on and off, until May 1933. Like Auden he was attracted in large part by the wide-open homosexual scene. As he wrote in his autobiography, Christopher and His Kind: “Berlin meant boys.” But not just any boys. Again like Auden, Isherwood had been sexually inhibited around men of his own social class and nationality and could explore his true self only with the “other”: he needed, in short, “a working-class foreigner.” He began frequenting the Cozy Corner with Auden and Layard, pleased that this was a proletarian dive and not one of those upscale gay-tourist bars in the West End filled with monocled boys in drag and Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets playing at being naughty. Looking back later on this scene, Isherwood asked acutely: “Wasn’t Berlin’s famous ‘decadence’ largely a commercial ‘line’ which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight-girl market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?”
Fortunately for Isherwood, the working-class boys who frequented the Cozy Corner were not interested in masquerades. Here he met his first “blue-eyed German boy,” Bubi. “By embracing Bubi,” Isherwood wrote, “Christopher could hold in his arms the whole mystery-magic of foreignness, Germanness. By means of Bubi, he could fall in love with and possess the entire nation.” He took Bubi to restaurants, the zoo, and to movies like Pudovkin’s Storm over Asia and G. W. Pabst’s Pandoras Box based on the play by Frank Wedekind. Perhaps inevitably, however, Bubi turned out to be not so possessable after alclass="underline" just another proletarian kid on the make. Moreover, he was not German at all, but Czech.
Again following Auden, Isherwood made a pilgrimage to Hirschfeld’s Sex Institute. He giggled nervously at the high-heeled boots for fetishists, the lacy panties designed for big-crotched Prussian officers, and the trouser legs cut off at the knees and equipped with elastic bands that allowed their wearer to go about town with nothing on but them and an overcoat—perfect for “giving a camera-quick exposure when a suitable viewer appeared.” Though somewhat embarrassed by all this, and by the “patients” under Hirschfeld’s care, he was forced to admit “a kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs.” The “decadence” of Berlin may have been in part a commercial put-on, but there was enough of the genuine article for Isherwood to experience the kind of inner-liberation he could never have managed back home in England.
However enticing Isherwood may have found Berlin’s homosexual scene, he was drawn to the city not only by his need for sexual emancipation, but also by the desire to make a gesture of defiance against his native country, which he had come to see as insufferably insular. In the eyes of most Britons, Germany was still the enemy, Berlin the capital of the Huns. Isherwood’s father had been killed in the war by the Germans, the very people with whom the son was now choosing to live. By decamping for Berlin, the young writer found the perfect way to cut the strings to family and fatherland.