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Authors: Christopher Isherwood

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BOOK: The Berlin Stories
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The foreign newspaper correspondents dine every night at the same little Italian restaurant, at a big round table, in the corner. Everybody else in the restaurant is watching them and trying to overhear what they are saying. If you have a piece of news to bring them—the details of an arrest, or the address of a victim whose relatives might be interviewed—then one of the journalists leaves the table and walks up and down with you outside, in the street.

A young communist I know was arrested by the S. A. men, taken to a Nazi barracks, and badly knocked about. After three or four days, he was released and went home. Next morning there was a knock at the door. The communist hobbled over to open it, his arm in a sling—and there stood a Nazi with a collecting-box. At the sight of him the communist completely lost his temper. “Isn’t it enough,” he yelled, “that you beat me up? And you dare to come and ask me for money?”

But the Nazi only grinned. “Now, now, comrade! No political squabbling! Remember, we’re living in the Third Reich! We’re all brothers! You must try and drive that silly political hatred from your heart!”

This evening I went into the Russian tea-shop in the Kleiststrasse, and there was D. For a moment I really thought I must be dreaming. He greeted me quite as usual, beaming all over his face.

“Good God!” I whispered. “What on earth are you doing here?”

D. beamed. “You thought I might have gone abroad?”

“Well, naturally….”

“But the situation nowadays is so interesting…,”

I laughed. “That’s one way of looking at it, certainly..,. But isn’t it awfully dangerous for you?”

D. merely smiled. Then he turned to the girl he was sitting with and said, “This is Mr. Isherwood… You can speak quite openly to him. He hates the Nazis as much as we do. Oh, yes! Mr. Isherwood is a confirmed anti-fascist!”

He laughed very heartily and slapped me on the back. Several people who were sitting near us overheard him. Their reactions were curious. Either they simply couldn’t believe their ears, or they were so scared that they pretended to hear nothing, and went on sipping their tea in a state of deaf horror. I have seldom felt so uncomfortable in my whole life.

(D.’s technique appears to have had its points, all the same. He was never arrested. Two months later, he successfully crossed the frontier into Holland.)

This morning, as I was walking down the Biilowstrasse, the Nazis were raiding the house of a small liberal pacifist publisher. They had brought a lorry and were piling it with the publisher’s books. The driver of the lorry mockingly read out the titles of the books to the crowd: “Nie Wieder Krieg!” he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile. Everybody roared with laughter.

” ‘No More War!” echoed a fat, well-dressed woman, with a scornful, savage laugh. “What an idea!”

At present, one of my regular pupils is Herr N., a police chief under the Weimar régime. He comes to me every day. He wants to brush up his English, for he is leaving very soon to take up a job in the United States. The curious thing about these lessons is that they are all given while we are driving about the streets in Herr N.’s enormous closed car. Herr N. himself never comes into our house: he sends up his chauffeur to fetch me, and the car moves off at once. Sometimes we stop for a few minutes at the edge of the Tiergarten, and stroll up and down the paths—the chauffeur always following us at a respectful distance.

Herr N. talks to me chiefly about his family. He is worried about his son, who is very delicate, and whom he is obliged to leave behind, to undergo an operation. His wife is delicate, too. He hopes the journey won’t tire her. He describes her symptoms, and the kind of medicine she is taking. He tells me stories about his son as a little boy. In a tactful, impersonal way we have become quite intimate. Herr N. is always charmingly polite, and listens gravely and carefully to my explanations of grammatical points. Behind everything he says I am aware of an immense sadness.

We never discuss politics; but I know that Herr N. must be an enemy of the Nazis, and, perhaps, even in hourly danger of arrest. One morning, when we were driving along the Unter den Linden, we passed a group of self-important S. A. men, chatting to each other and blocking the whole pavement. Passers-by were obliged to walk in the gutter. Herr N. smiled faintly and sadly: “One sees some queer sights in the streets nowadays.” That was his only comment.

Sometimes he will bend forward to the window and regard a building or a square with a mournful fixity, as if to impress its image upon his memory and to bid it goodbye.

Tomorrow I am going to England. In a few weeks I shall return, but only to pick up my things, before leaving Berlin altogether.

Poor Frl. Schroeder is inconsolable: “I shall never find another gentleman like you, Herr Issyvoo—always so punctual with the rent… I’m sure I don’t know what makes you want to leave Berlin, all of a sudden, like this….”

It’s no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new régime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about “Der Führer” to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatising herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatising themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.

To-day the sun is brilliantly shining; it is quite mild and warm. I go out for my last morning walk, without an overcoat or hat. The sun shines, and Hitler is master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends—my pupils at the Workers’ School, the men and women I met at the I. A. H.—are in prison, possibly dead. But it isn’t of them that I am thinking—the clear-headed ones, the purposeful, the heroic; they recognised and accepted the risks. I am thinking of poor Rudi, in his absurd Russian blouse. Rudi’s make-believe, story-book game has become earnest; the Nazis will play it with him. The Nazis won’t laugh at him; they’ll take him on trust for what he pretended to be. Perhaps at this very moment Rudi is being tortured to death.

I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can’t help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past—like a very good photograph.

No. Even now I can’t altogether believe that any of this has really happened….

 

The End

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

Christopher Isherwood is one of a group of gifted writers who emerged in England in the 19.30’s. A United States citizen since 1946, he was elected a member of the (U.S.) National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

In 1929, a year after the publication of his first novel, Isherwood went to Berlin to visit W. H. Auden (his friend since boarding school days) who had been sent there by his parents to learn German. Isherwood’s Berlin period lasted four years—”Hitler’s coming to power made me an honorary refugee,” he has said—and it was in Berlin that he found the materials for his famous novels The Last of Mr. Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939) which, combined, became The Berlin Stories, first issued by New Directions in 1946. The play,
I Am a Camera
, adapted by John van Druten from The Berlin Stories, opened on Broadway in 1951, and later became a motion picture.

Isherwood’s two earlier novels, both with an English setting, All the Conspirators (1928) and The Memorial (1932) are now published by New Directions, as well as his autobiography, Lions and Shadows (1938). Novels written since he came to live in the United States are Prater Violet (1945), The World in the Evening (1954), Down There on a Visit (1962), and A Single Man (1964). He has published three verse plays and a travel diary (about China in 1938) in collaboration with Auden. A second travel book, The Condor and the Cows (1949), is the diary of a South American journey.

Isherwood has described himself as “a member of the Wider Quaker Fellowship and a pacifist.” He is now at work on a life of Ramakrishna, 19th century Indian saint. With Swami Prab-havananda of the Vedanta Society of Southern California he has edited two volumes of Vedanta philosophy and has translated from the Sanskrit The Bhagavad-Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms.

Table of Contents

ABOUT THIS BOOK

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BOOK: The Berlin Stories
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