Goodbye to Berlin

Book excerpt: "First published in 1939, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Unflinchingly precise and funny, Isherwood captures the city where he lived from 1929 to 1933, its charming avenues and cafés; its sexy night life; its dreamers, eccentrics, runaways, cadgers; its morally bankrupt mobs and millionaires. Hitler's shadow looms over Isherwood's demimonde--the divinely decadent Sally Bowles; plump Fraulein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Büste to relieve her heart palpitations; the quarrelsome, childlike Nowaks suffocated by poverty and disease; the wealthy and doomed Jewish merchants the Landauers"--