Another motive for his move to Berlin was his belief that the city would provide a stimulating environment for his work. Like Auden, Isherwood was a serious artist (albeit not so gifted), and he spent considerably less time chasing boys than sitting at his writing table. A telling scene in Christopher and His Kind has him leaving a party early in order to be fresh for writing the next morning. “Seldom have wild oats been sown so prudently,” he admitted.
The sensibility that Isherwood brought to his work was increasingly shaped by the sociopolitical ambiance of the Spree metropolis as it slipped into depression and chaos. “Here was the seething brew of history in the making—a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books,” he wrote later. “The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”
Having decided in 1929 to stay on in Berlin, Isherwood moved with one of his lovers to a dingy flat near the Hallesches Tor. Visiting him there in the summer of 1930, Stephen Spender found him living very frugally, eating horse meat and lung soup. After moving briefly to another slum near Kottbuser Tor, Isherwood found more lasting quarters in a flat at Nollendorfstrasse 17. This was middle-class shabby as opposed to slum-shabby. A description of it can be found in his novel, Goodbye to Berlin:
From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.
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.
In early 1929 the police began to accumulate evidence of theft, fraud, and bribery against two high-profile Eastern European Jews, Leo and Willy Sklarek, who owned a textile firm in Berlin that supplied the city with uniforms and other equipment. Classical parvenus, the Sklareks lived in palatial West End villas, drove fancy cars, kept a stable of ponies at the track, and, to ensure a certain freedom in their business dealings, greased the palms of local officials. Apparently they did not spread their bribes quite widely enough, however, for the police eventually arrested them for trafficking in stolen goods. In assembling a case against them, the prosecutors discovered that the brothers had sent Mayor Böss a fur coat for his wife without including a bill. To his credit, the mayor had repeatedly offered to pay for the coat and was eventually billed for 375 marks, which he knew was far too low. He therefore sent the Sklareks an additional payment of 1000 marks, asking that they use the money to buy a painting for his beloved city museum. They did so, but since the actual cost of the coat was 4,950 marks the mayor still seemed to have turned the kind of deal not available to nonofficeholders. When the matter became public in September 1929, all the factions that had long opposed Böss’s liberal policies seized upon this issue to vilify him. The Communists called him a typical capitalist crook, while Goebbels’s Der Angriff branded him a bedmate of the Jews. The mayor happened to be traveling in America when the scandal broke and unwisely did not hasten back to face his accusers. When he finally did return he was accosted by a mob that tried to beat him up. Humiliated and disgusted, he took early retirement from his office, never to return. The Sklareks, for their part, got four years in jail.
Mayor Böss’s political career was not the only casualty in this affair. The Prussian Landtag conducted an investigation that treated the case as another example of “Berlin corruption,” thus reinforcing images of the city as one big sleeze-factory— Sklarekstadt. So tarnished was Berlin’s reputation that a circus impresario named Stosch-Sarrasani campaigned to replace Böss with the slogan, “A circus director can become mayor of Berlin, but a mayor of Berlin could never become a circus director.” The scandal played an important role in the communal elections of November 17, 1929, which saw the Communists gain at the expense of the SPD, and the Nazis win representation in the city assembly for the first time. Goebbels crowed that with the Nazi showing, his “boldest dreams” had come true. In fact, he was being more than a little hyperbolic, since the Nazis had garnered only 3.1 percent of the vote, a long way from their dream of controlling Berlin. Still, they had made a significant step forward, and every gain for them was a loss for Weimar democracy.