He becomes friends with them, particularly the daughter, Natalia, a gracious and shy young woman, and Bernhard, the nephew and manager of the store. Isherwood has a letter of introduction to them but does not use it, till Fräulein Schroeder makes a gratuitous anti-Semitic remark. They are a rich Jewish family that owns a successful department store. The other side concerns his friends, the Landauers. The father is a drunk, the younger brother, whom Isherwood had met in a previous story as a hustler, is lazy and always feeling sorry for himself and Frau Nowak ends up in the sanatorium. In one story, Isherwood, who is temporarily broke, stays with the Nowaks, a not very well-off family.
We do get to see the Berlin of the time and the rise of the Nazis, as in Mr. The other stories are less interesting, only because there is no Sally Bowles. He gets a postcard from Paris and then Rome and then nothing. After this things cool off and, though he does see her again, the relationship fades away and, eventually, she moves away. Her affairs often end badly as the men have their fun and then move on, leaving her, in one case, pregnant (Isherwood helps her get an abortion). She treats Isherwood as a friend or, perhaps as a brother, calling on him when he is needed. She is what Isherwood called gay (in the old sense of the word), lives for the moment, is totally straightforward, massacres the German language, lives on prairie oysters and just wants to enjoy herself. He is clearly in love with her, though she has a succession of affairs, primarily with rich men.
In the story, the hero/narrator, called Christopher Isherwood, though Fräulein Schroeder insists on calling him Herr Issyvoo, meets her through a mutual friend. She was based on Jean Ross, a Scottish woman who would become Claud Cockburn‘s second wife and her surname came from the writer Paul Bowles, whom Isherwood had recently met in Berlin. Sally Bowles is probably Isherwood’s greatest creation. Of the six stories, by far the best known is Sally Bowles, not least because it has been transposed to the theatre and the cinema, first as John van Druten’s play I Am A Camera (the second paragraph of the story reads I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking, a statement that turns to be quite inaccurate) and the film adapted from the play and then as the stage musical, Cabaret and the film of the musical. Norris Changes Trains, much of the novel revolves around Fräulein Schroeder’s rooming house and its occupants. Norris Changes Trains are all that remains of his scheme. He never completed it but this novel, which is, in fact, six linked but separate episodes, and Mr. Isherwood originally intended to write a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin called The Lost. Home » England » Christopher Isherwood » Goodbye to Berlin Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin
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