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Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years, by Norman Page
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Like Paris in the '20s, Berlin in the early thirties was one of the most exciting cities in the world. As the Weimar Republic sputtered to a close and war loomed on the horizon, the city was a magnet for talented writers and artists. It was in this now-vanished time and place that W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lived, wrote and slept together. Norman Page tells the story of how these years shaped these important writers and, in doing so, illuminates a bygone era.
- Sales Rank: #904512 in Books
- Published on: 2000-05-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .55" w x 5.50" l, .72 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 220 pages
Amazon.com Review
For late-20th-century culture, Berlin in the 1930s has become a place of mythic enchantment and decadence, a hypersexual Eden fraught with the danger of oncoming fascism. But this late-century fantasy of the Weimar Republic has always obscured the material reality of the actual time and place. Norman Page's Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years is a succinct, extraordinarily well researched, and perceptive look at a very complicated cultural and political point in history. While Page organizes his book as a joint biography of novelist Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin Stories were the basis for Cabaret) and poet W.H. Auden--two politically progressive Englishmen who fled to Berlin to pursue the personal freedom they could not find at home--the book is actually a portrait of frantic Berlin culture from 1928 to 1933. While Auden and Isherwood were drawn to the city because of its open gay social life, Page makes it clear that the conditions allowing that freedom also created a vibrant, exhilarating artistic culture. From Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel to Magnus Hirschfeld's fight for sexual liberation, Page places Isherwood and Auden (and their work) in a clear and beautifully textured historical context. Using Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind and Auden's unpublished diaries, Page brings new insights to both these writers and an era that had a profound formative effect on their lives and work. --Michael Bronski
From Publishers Weekly
Although the revival of Cabaret makes Page's study timely, the opportunity is mishandled. His visit to the Berlin years of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood reads like a series of rambling academic lectures. Source notes clot the narrative, pronoun references are often vague, and the detailed survey of 1928-1933 urban topography further erodes the narrative. Friends and, briefly, lovers, the two writers escaped to Weimar Berlin to sample its gay clubs and rent boys. Auden, who would visit during holidays, found much inspiration but little of literary value in the sexual turn-ons of the scene. Isherwood would casually mask his experience in the novellas collected as The Berlin Stories (1935-1939), which Page (A.E. Housman) calls "too discreet, too evasive, too readily disposed to encode and displace, to make use of what must have been wonderfully colourful material." That Isherwood's stories were autobiographical fiction rather than autobiography and were written for a more censorious generation, yet inspired the play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret, seems less significant to Page than their less-than-complete exposure of the depression-driven daydream that Berlin seemed to be before the rise of Hitler. From Isherwood's 1977 memoir, Christopher and His Kind, Page quotes the author's rueful confession, "Seldom have wild oats been sown more prudently." This book reflects that disappointment. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Berlin in the late 1920sAbefore Hitler's power surgeAwas acknowledged to be a city of sexual freedom that was also open to all forms of art and artists. Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood were two of those artists who visited Berlin and stayed longer than intended. It wasn't simply that Berlin was accepting of sexual ambiguityAand in any case, Auden and Isherwood were not ambiguous in their homosexuality. More importantly, as Page (emeritus, modern English literature, Univ. of Nottingham) makes clear, the city's glittering decadence and aura of untrammeled experimentation fostered Auden's poetry and even more so Isherwood's prose. Page makes his case convincingly by devoting a section of his book to the boy-bars, streets, neighborhoods, houses of Berlin, and to the subculture of transvestism. Page also discusses other personalities operative in Berlin from approximately 1929 to 1933, most notably Magnus Hirschfeld who founded the Institute for Sexology. The final two sections deal with the social impact of the Weimar cinema and the specific writings of each man, with a greater emphasis on Isherwood's autobiographical works. Entertaining and insightful reading; highly recommended.ARobert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Seeds sown in the soil of turmoil
By Grady Harp
Books of fiction and nonfiction, films, paintings, and museums abound in the ongoing ceaseless inspection of the atrocity and madness wrought by Hitler in Nazi Germany. It is an unfortunate fact that such turmoil gives rise to some of the best art in the years after the strife. Norman Page, in his brilliantly researched and written AUDEN AND ISHERWOOD: THE BERLIN YEARS, has selected two men of great significance in literature and poetry as his points of entry into studying the Berlin that seduced the world before it jolted nearly to an end. These portraits of Auden and Isherwood are really an examination of an historical time that altered the art world as inevitably as it altered our sense of the dangers of dictaorship.
Initally drawn to Berlin from the hallowed halls of English academe because of the rowdy free sex/hedonisitc atmosphere that had become Berlin, "Berlin meant Boys" and both our artists fled the England that sacrificed Oscar Wilde to find the open sexual freedom of the City of Sodom. Author Page gives us such a rich, fascinating ride through the places and faces of pre-war Berlin that we are finally allowed to see why Modernism started, why cinema became important, how artists such as Grosz and Dix and composers such as Weill and Stravinsky, scientists (Hirschfeld) and writers (Brecht) found such acrid colors for their creativity. Page is not confined to his title characters, though we learn more personal characteristics than any writer has dared to date: we are informed about Marlene Dietrich, Stephen Spender, Benjamin Britten, as well as a constellation of other characters encountered by them. This volume reads like a novel (not without some kinship to Isherwood's famed GOODBYE TO BERLIN), but its importance as a publication is its uncommonly thorough view of why Hitler rose, why the Berlin Wall was destined to be (and to fall), and why the center of the artistic universe was for a few short years the glossy, naughty Berlin.
This book is a must for those who want to understand the beginnings of sexual freedom, those fascinated by the inception of WW II, and for those who happen to love the poetry of W.H. Auden and the stories of Christopher Isherwood. Keep this book on your literary Reference Shelf.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Mistitled
By disco75
I essentially agree with the Publisher's Weekly review of this volume, but feel that perhaps the reading public would be better served if the book were called *Berlin: The Auden and Isherwood Years.* It is a portrait of the city found in Isherwood's writings, not a biographical work or portrait of the authors.
The bulk of the book involves a painstaking painting of Berlin, as obsessively detailed as a Civil War reenactor's map-poring. The chapter titles convey the author's approach: Berlin Faces (biographical sketches of sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, archeologist and bon vivant Francis Turville-Petre, anthropologist John Layard, critic Gerald Hamilton and others); Berlin Places (which compulsively recreates the architecture of Weimar era streets and buildings); Weimar Cinema (film in Berlin); Writing (where Page examines the works of the titular authors). It can be seen that there is little biographical coverage of Auden and Isherwood here.
These four chapters are prefaced by a strange, conflicted review of Auden's and Isherwood's sex lives in the city. This would be the most biographical material in the volume, except that Page can't decide what attitude to take as author. He wants to poo-poo the conservatives who disapprove of either discussions of the men's homosexuality or the sexual orientation itself. Yet Page writes with judgmental though entranced language recalling Maggie Smith's best stiff-upper-lip line readings (copulatory pinewoods, soldiers' trousers stretched tight over chubby buttocks, exploration of low-life, irresponsibility, prudence, lurid etc). He comes off as neither credible academic nor gay history buff but rather pained outsider.
It's interesting that the Acknowledgements don't contain a nod to an editor. Editing could have helped. In a 3-page epilogue Page introduces the premise that should have informed every preceding chapter (how the Berlin experiences reflected crucial aspects of both mens' personal and professional lives). Editing would have revised the personal conflicts revealed in Page's pursed-lip language. Editing could have broken up some of the 50-, 60- and 70- word sentences to avoid benumbed reader concentration. All in all, a work for researchers rather than lay readers.
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