Goodbye to Berlin
Goodbye to Berlin
By Christopher Isherwood
“Sally Bowles took center stage in the book’s musical adaptation, Cabaret, but the theatrical version can’t match the power and richness of the original.”—Time, 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th-Century
“In Isherwood's work, a magic potion of history and invention, the voice is clear, and, no matter how many times we hear it, it always seems to be speaking for the first time.”—Howard Moss, The New York Times Book Review
First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy with its mobs and millionaires. The shadow of Hitler looms menacingly, towering higher and higher. Goodbye to Berlin is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable and "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles; plump Fraülein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Büste to relieve heart palpitations; Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling with their relationship; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family the Landauers.
Paperback
218 pages
New Directions, 2012
Originally Published in 1934
5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
ISBN 9780811220248
Fiction