The Treatment of Nazism in "Goodbye to Berlin"

The first Nazi we are introduced to in Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin" is Frl. Mayr, a fellow boarder at the Frl. Schroeder residence, who has developed a feud with a Jewish lady, Frau Glanterneck. The whole tiff seems a bit ridiculous: Glanterneck once complained about Mayr's yodeling, and now the "ardent Nazi" has decided to innocently exercise her wrath by pulling a cruel, but ultimately insignificant, prank on her (10-11). Read in the context of what occurs later on in the decade of the 1930's, however, this scene is quite disturbing and representative of Isherwood's treatment of Nazism throughout his story as something absurd; and consequently as an ideology not taken seriously by a complacent working class and Jewish population. "People laugh at them, right up to the last moment..." Isherwood warns Bernhard Landauer later in the book (179).

The characters at risk in "Goodbye to Berlin" rarely seem to worry about the true dangers of Nazism. Herr Bernstein will not let his wife take the family car into the city for fear it might be stoned by Nazi rioters ("And suppose they throw stones at me?" Frau Bernstein asks) (18). Although Frau Nowak thinks the Nazi party has changed her son Lothar, she speaks of it as if it is an after-school club that has put "silly ideas into his head," as innocent an activity as his night-class or drawing (109). Even as Bernhard begins receiving death threats presumably from Nazi adversaries, he brushes them off as "nonsense" (178-179).

At least within the contents of the story, is there any reason for these characters to be frightened? The Nazi characters we encounter (and there are only a handful of them) don't seem menacing enough to warrant hysteria. At a beach on Ruegen Island, Isherwood recalls seeing "a child of about five years old...marching along all by himself with a swastika flag over his shoulder" (86). While the immediate effect of this imagery is the reinforcement of a sense of unthreatening childishness, we begins to wonder if the embedding of these attitudes in the German kids makes Nazism even more sinister. Isherwood turns his attention to a group of little girls 20 pages later: Singing with their father they sound like "demons of the air" and never flinch when a coins falls a window above and pops "like a bullet" on the pavement (116). Other brief snippets hint at the acceptance of violence amplifying in Germany: Frau Glanterneck's black eye, a Nazi soldier's coy admission of the use of poison gas. Every time Isherwood includes one of these scenes, he asks us to imagine these seemingly ordinary and sometimes goofy people committing the most evil crimes. When Isherwood sits and listens to Otto Nowak about the sickness of his mother, Otto's youth makes Christopher humor at the ludicrousness of the death discussion, the "description of a funeral by a painted clown" (114). Isherwood must have seen the same nonsensicalness in the Nazi party: the "talk of death" from a five-year-old, naked vacationer and Frl. Mayr.

In examining Isherwood's outlook on Nazism's role in 1930's Berlin, it is important to consider that, as an English outsider, the author could be getting it wrong. Isherwood partially admits this himself upon observing the funeral of an important Democratic politician: "We had nothing to do with those Germans down there, marching, or with the dead man in the coffin, or with the words on the banners" (49). This is his confession of detachment from the political proceedings of the time.

Works Cited.

Isherwood, Christopher. "Goodbye to Berlin." The Berlin Stories.