Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin / Snippet of 'Hello Berlin!'

Snippet of 'Hello Berlin!' at the bottom of this blogpost. First a little introduction to the snippet; actually this introduction has been lifted from another blog (habitatsforhumans.tumblr.com) as I thought the photographs and paragraph were so perfectly apt and concise. 

A visit to Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin

The author Christopher Isherwood lived in Berlin in the 1930s. He beautifully illustrates the city, its people and the decadence and poverty of the time, as the Nazis crept into power. Isherwood’s characters are all based on people he knew in the city - wonderful, complex, intriguing and often decadent, repressed or tragic individuals; he honours them all by writing about them with such generous attention to detail. Frl. Schroeder, his landlady, rented a room to Isherwood on Nollendorfstrasse, in the Shoeneberg district of Berlin, which I have shown photographs of above …His books Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains focus on Berlin and are brilliant. 
(habitatsforhumans.tumblr.com) 

Snippet from 'Hello Berlin!' 

5th May 2005

Nollendorfplatz

Altbauen* – beautifully décored and restored

Red-brick churches

and small intimate cafes

surrounding a gorgeous market square

This is where I live

My neighbourhood

So full of colour and life

The layout, the architecture

So pleasing to the eye

I just sit here people-watching

I could sit here all day every day

It’s not just Anja I’m falling in love with. It’s damn fine

living in Berlin. You can cycle to work on the wide empty

roads (Berlin’s population is a third of London’s), cruise

across the city in twenty-five minutes or contact a friend

at short notice to get ice cream on a Sunday at midnight

in a café on a cobblestoned street. (I don’t have a job or

friend – but it’s all potentially there for me.) At the foot of

most apartment buildings are all night restaurants and

bars, so the streets are always lit and inviting.

I grew up in Harrow, where grey skies, concrete

buildings, and cracked tar roads full of traffic dominated

the landscape. I feel like I need to sit here and absorb all

that’s around me in my new home to feel human again

after years of living like a cog in a badly-oiled machine.

This is Nollendorfplatz, the centre of gay and

Bohemian life in Germany during the Weimar period

between the wars with its theatres, clubs and cabarets.

Despite the Altbauen*, I feel no sense of history sitting in

its cafés. It’s fresh and new, with its curry houses, sushi

restaurants, cocktail bars and young people. But this is

where Christopher Isherwood wrote his famous Berlin

Stories which became the film Cabaret. Some internet

research led me to Fraulein Thurau’s boarding house on

Nollendorfstrasse where he lived, worked and set his

stories. This was a thrill as I’d been getting my pizza

slices from the amazing Dolce Pizza stall just two

minutes away nearly every day. Imagine: ‘Where is that

place that I want to go pay homage to? Oh, two minutes

down that street.’

Isherwood arrived in Berlin in 1929 to visit his friend

W.H. Auden and ended up staying until the Nazis were

in power – burning books to send a message to the rest of

the world about what they stood for. His writings sum up

the vibrant Weimar culture that existed before Hitler. It

was a time of decadence and dancing while the Nazis

lurked menacingly in the background – they were

actually comical to the Berlin hipsters, handing out

propaganda flyers and asking for donations. And as they

seized control of Germany, Berliners became even more

party-crazy, as what else is there  to do when the world

seems to be coming to an end?

(*Altbauen - old buildings)