The Evolution of Cabaret.

From 1929 to 1933, I lived almost continuously in Berlin, with only occasional visits to other parts of Germany and to England. Already, during that time, I had made up my mind that I would one day write about the people I'd met and the experiences I was having. So I kept a detailed diary, which in due course provided raw material for all my Berlin stories. 1 - Christopher Isherwood July 1954 Mr. Isherwood's painstaking efforts as a diarist were not wasted. His original concept was to turn his experiences into a "huge tightly constructed melodramatic novel.' 2 Instead, his memoirs reached print as a loosely interrelated series of short stories bolstered by incisive character portraits. In 1935 the author published Mr. Norris Changes Trains (American title: The Last of Mr. Norris), an account of smuggling and espionage in Berlin, basing his depictions of Arthur Norris and others on real-life prototypes. Isherwood's journalistic flair, combined with his poet's eye, provided lasting portraits of Berlin just prior to the start of the Third Reich. One of the most memorable characters to emerge from the diary is Sally Bowles. Isherwood's Sally is a young English would-be actress and demimondaine who sings (none too expertly) at The Lady Windermere, a Tauentzienstrasse cabaret. A social dropout with a kooky life-style and Bohemian amorality, she is very much a predecessor to Capote's Holly Golightly. Isherwood's tribute to Sally first came out in 1937. Two years later, five thematically related short pieces - "A Berlin Diary: Autumn 1930," "On Ruegen Island: Summer 1931," "The Nowaks." "The Landauers," and "A Berlin Diary: Winter 1932-3" - were collected with "Sally Bowles" into a novella of sorts, entitled Goodbye to Berlin. (In turn. Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains were bound together in 1946 in a volume with the overall title The Berlin Stories - which is how they have been popularly known ever since.) The author's recollections of pre-Nazi Berlin document an era, just as they immortalize places and people - chiefly a seedy rooming-house, a girl, and a cabaret. The stories of Goodbye to Berlin are told in first-person narrative by a budding novelist by the name of Christopher Isherwood, or as Fraulein Schroeder, his landlady, pronounces it, "Herr Issyvoo." The proportion of autobiography to fiction can only be guessed at - but what is significant about Isherwood's work, beyond its evocation of period and mood, is the long life it has maintained in the media - first as a collection of reminiscences, then as a stage play called I Am a Camera, next as a film of the same title, then as the Tony award-winning musical Cabaret, and, most recently, as another motion picture. Sally Bowles and her compatriots have, in short, had more incarnations than almost any other figures of contemporary literature. A brief look at the source tells us why. The story begins in the autumn of 1930 as young Isherwood comes to Berlin, assumedly to soak up atmosphere for a novel. Fraulein Schroeder's rooming-house strikes him as just the place for that. Bars, cafes, and theatres are nearby - and the boarding-house itself provides a feast for a youngster craving subjects for character study. Schroeder is a gentlewoman who became impoverished during World War I and the resultant inflation. It was in these years that she began renting her rooms. In 1930, she hasn't even a room to herself, but sleeps in the parlor behind a screen. Her lodgers, not the genteel, educated roomers of yesteryear, include Fraulein Mayr, a Bavarian music hall jodlerin; Bobby, a barman; and Fraulein Kost, an aging streetwalker with an insatiable yearning for sailors (much to the chagrin of Fraulein Schroeder). This, then, is the milieu Christopher Isherwood enters. Forever recording what he sees, he habituates the dens of Berlin low-life - following the street people (and, occasionally, his pupils, whom he tutors in English) to smoke-filled cabarets, on excursions to the beach, and to sidewalk cafes for late-hour conversation. …