Response to Goodbye To Berlin

A detailed Summary of Response to Goodbye To Berlin

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking" (Isherwood 1). This phrase comes from the first page of Christopher Isherwood's most popular documentary styled novel, Goodbye to Berlin (1939). In this novel, Isherwood managed to establish a sort of "matter-of-fact" style by blending fact and fiction and achieving a naive, honest style for the narrator. "The phrase "I am a camera" often appears in his work indicating his belief that a narrator should serve the role of a simple recording device" (Caudwell 2). By achieving this, Isherwood provides the readers with an unsurpassed portrait of Berlin, a city in the process of internal decay, in the turbulent years of Hitler's rise in power. "It is as if...Isherwood is masquerading "as a war correspondent..." (Piazza 2). Isherwood is the outsider looking in, observing a war (holocaust) in which he is not involved; but he does show glimpses and portraits of characters that have been affected by it. "He immerses himself in the world of prostitutes, living almost anonymously in shabbily genteel and working class areas of the city and translating his experience of the demimonde image of what would eventually become the defi

Fraulin Schroeder is the first character that is encountered in the story. She is a landlady in around her mid fifties. The narrator describes this very colorful woman as

The Nowark family, of all the characters in the novel, are most greatly effected economically by Hitler's rein in power and his Nazi movement. The family lives in poverty, in a condemned attic of an old building located in the deteriorating city of Berlin. Frau Nowak, the hard working and caring mother who is suffering from an illness that seems to be more serious than she thinks. Otto is her "ungrateful and unemployed" son who she considers disrespectful, lazy, and smart-mouthed. The two have many loud but mostly amusing arguments in that little attic, and Otto always tries to make up with his mother at the end even though she does not buy it. The next child introduced is Grete, an overweight 12 year-old spoiled girl who tended to do a lot of singing, eating, and siting in the chair. She was the typical "baby" of the family, favored by the parents and picked on by the older brother. Lothar is the older son of the Nowaks who is barely ever home. He is only 20 years old but acts more like a man especially compared to Otto. He is currently unemployed due to the slow job market but attends night school and wants to study engineering. He and Otto are very different and Frau Nowak tends to favor him over Otto. She points this out many times, "Otto's not a bad boy...but he's such a scatterbrain. Quite the opposite of my Lothar-there's a model son for you! He's not too proud to do any job, whatever it is, and when he's scraped a few groschen together, instead of spending them on himself he comes straight to me and says: 'Here you are, mother. Just buy yourself a pair of warm house-shoes for the winter'." (Isherwood 106). The only problem with Lothar is that he attends Nazi meetings. Frau Nowak wishes he did not go mostly because of fear. "I often wish he'd never taken up with them at all. They put all kinds of silly ideas into his head. It makes him so restless.

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Approximate Word count = 3333
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels