‘Outside, in the night beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. I decided to (very roughly) draw my interpretation of a particular passage towards the end of the novel: I loved the novel, I found it very visual and I wanted to try something a little different as a response to reading it. However, now a large proportion of the church is damaged and it has been kept like this with a memorial hall as a reminder. I was looking at pictures of the Church before the Second World War in its original state, as Isherwood would have seen it whilst he was writing. An example of this is the Memorial Church. It will be different because of personal experience and thought, and it will be different because time has inevitably changed the city. Not only will Isherwood’s view of the city be different from my own, it will be different to every other person who has ever visited or thought about Berlin. But Isherwood presents Berlin as a city of contrasts, a city of wildly different characters, and ultimately, a city that is undergoing a vast transformation under the rise of fascism. It seems amazing that characters as complex and different as Sally Bowles, Otto and Bernhard can even exist within one city. Goodbye to Berlin is an incredibly evocative novel with a sinister undertone as Isherwood experiences the rise of the Nazis in a pre-war Germany. Certain symbols and certain phrases will take precedence over others and a different image of the city might emerge. What I find interesting however, is that the idea of the city he presents within his writing might not always translate to the reader. Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin is one such representation.

We are not only presented with the city we visit, real and concrete, but the idea of the city we have ourselves and representations of cities from others. Cities are ever-changing spaces and not just when new buildings are constructed.

Goodby to berlin