I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
— Christopher Isherwood, A Berlin Diary, Autumn 1930
The events depicted in The Berlin Stories are derived from Isherwood's colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic.[7][8] In 1929, Isherwood moved to Weimar Berlin during the twilight of the Golden Twenties. At the time, Isherwood was an apprentice novelist who was politically indifferent[a] about the rise of fascism in Germany.[11][12] He had relocated to Berlin to pursue a hedonistic life as an openly gay man and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.[13][14] He socialized with a blithe coterie of gay writers that included Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles,[b] and W.H. Auden.[17]
In Berlin during Winter 1930–1931, Isherwood met Gerald Hamilton, an unscrupulous businessman who inspired the fictional character of Arthur Norris.[1] Like the fictional character which he inspired, Hamilton was regarded by his fellow British expatriates to be a "nefarious, amoral, sociopathic, manipulative conniver" who "did not hesitate to use or abuse friends and enemies alike."[1] Isherwood later alleged that Hamilton likely stole a large sum of money from him when the author asked Hamilton to bribe officials in order rescue his gay lover Heinz Neddermeyer from persecution by the Nazi regime due to his sexual orientation.[1]
Jean [Ross] was more essentially British than Sally [Bowles]; she grumbled like a true Englishwoman, with her 'grin-and-bear-it' grin. And she was tougher. She never struck Christopher as being sentimental or the least bit sorry for herself. Like Sally, she boasted continually about her lovers. In those days, Christopher felt certain that she was exaggerating...
—Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind (1976)[18]
Due to his limited finances, Isherwood shared modest lodgings in Berlin with 19-year-old Jean Ross,[c] a British cabaret singer who inspired the fictional character of Sally Bowles.[20] An aspiring film actress, Ross earned her living as a chanteuse in lesbian bars and second-rate cabarets.[20][21] Isherwood visited these nightclubs to hear Ross sing,[22] and he later described her voice as poor yet effective: "She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice. She sang badly,[d] without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her."[24] Likewise, Stephen Spender recalled that Ross' singing ability was quite underwhelming: "In my mind's eye, I can see her now in some dingy bar standing on a platform and singing so inaudibly that I could not hear her from the back of the room where I was discreetly seated."[25]
While rooming together with Isherwood at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg,[26] Ross became pregnant.[27][28] She assumed the father of the child to be jazz pianist—and later actor—Peter van Eyck.[28] Following Eyck's abandonment of Ross, she underwent an abortion facilitated by Isherwood.[29][30] Ross nearly died as a result of the botched abortion.[23][28] While Ross recovered from the abortion procedure, the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Germany.[31]
John Van Druten adapted Isherwood's work into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera.As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right,"[32] Ross, Spender, and other foreigners realized that they must leave the country.[31][33] "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled.[31] In contrast to Spender's feeling of impending doom, Isherwood complained "somewhat unpresciently to Spender that situation in Germany seemed 'very dull.'"[34]
However, following Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Isherwood finally noticed the sinister developments occurring within the country,[23] and he commented to a friend: "Adolf, with his rectangular black moustache, has come to stay and brought all his friends.... Nazis are to be enrolled as 'auxiliary police,' which means that one must now not only be murdered but that it is illegal to offer any resistance."[23] Two weeks after Hitler passed the Enabling Act which cemented his power, Isherwood fled Germany and returned to England on 5 April 1933.[35]
Following Isherwood's departure from Germany and the enstatement of the Hitler's brutalitarian regime, most of Berlin's seedy cabarets were shuttered by the Nazis,[e] and many of Isherwood's cabaret friends would later flee abroad or perish in concentration camps.[37] These factual events served as the genesis for Isherwood's Berlin tales. His 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin was later adapted by playwright John Van Druten into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera and, ultimately, the 1966 Cabaret musical.[38]
