Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin@80

ALAN CUMMING:

“...In reading these pages again, I also realized the fallacy of Isherwood trying to tell us he is merely a literary vessel, the unthinking camera of the first page with its shutter open, some sort of lucky Zelig of a scribe whose age and circumstance and sexual proclivity all led him to be at the center of a social and political storm in Berlin in the late twenties which he merely records for future regurgitation. This feigned modesty combined with his casual, often impersonal, very English style belies the passion and the pain of the time he is retelling, his spare and precise descriptions so brutal in their accuracy in nailing the human condition, even in circumstances most of us will never have experienced, and I certainly hope I never shall.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have been there to feel the turn in the public conscience, to actually see the beginning of the violence and the acceptance of Nazism as a mainstream political alternative and finally a national edict. But I don’t need to. Christopher Isherwood tells me, and each time I return he has more insights and revelations for me....”