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Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years
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(2 Votes)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 were the basis for ) 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 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 Using Isherwood's and Auden's unpublished diaries, Page brings new insights to both these writers and an era that had a profound formative effect on their lives and work.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
--This text refers to an alternate
edition.
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.
--This text refers to an alternate
edition.
23/01/2011
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 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 chublife, 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.
04/05/2001
Books of fiction and nonfiction, films, paintings, and museums abound in the ongoing ceaseless inspection of the atrocity and madness wrought 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.
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 The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Tennyson (Palgrave Literary Dictionaries) Norman Page, Valerie Purton |
