First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming, with its avenues and cafés, marvelously grotesque, with its nightlife and dreamers, dangerous, with its vice and intrigue, powerful and seedy, with its mobs and millionaires - this was the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power. Goodbye to Berlin is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable and divinely decadent Sally Bowles, plump Fraulein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Buste relieve her heart palpitations, Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling to come to terms with their relationship, and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the Landauers.

Other editions

More by Christopher Isherwood →