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....”