IN MAY OF 1928, Christopher Isherwood made his first trip to Germany. He went as a tourist on a brief visit to the port city of Bremen. Though unremarkable in many respects, this trip would prove to be amazingly generative. For the reading public, the visit was a catalyst that would eventually result in some of the most entertaining writing to come out of the 1930’s. To many, Isherwood is known primarily as the author of The Berlin Stories, the source material for what became the musical and film Cabaret. For Isherwood himself, however, the trip to Germany opened his eyes to the possibility of a different way of life.
England had grown stifling to Isherwood: patriotism and propriety—values to which Britons of a certain age and class clung tenaciously—had become repellent to him. As the eldest son of a father who had died fighting in the Great War, Isherwood had been saddled with the expectation, from his mother and schoolmasters, that he measure up to a heroic ideal, but it was an expectation that he rejected as outmoded and retrograde. Instead, Isherwood and his circle rushed toward the excitement and vibrancy of the modern, turning their backs on the Edwardian sentiments of their parents’ generation. Isherwood abandoned his family’s English manor house for a low-rent flat on the Continent. A year after his brief trip to Bremen, Isherwood moved to Berlin, for the express purpose of joining his friend W. H. Auden. Together they set out to enjoy the notorious licentiousness of the Weimar capital.
Isherwood would come to admit that this emigration from England was a rejection of British haute bourgeois mores. As he aged, he grew increasingly candid about his reasons for relocating to Germany. In a 1973 interview, he said of his time in Berlin: “I was young and full of life and tremendously happy to be away from all the restraints which England represented—above all, to feel completely free sexually.” Thus he felt both a push from behind to leave England and a powerful pull toward the German capital and its “harsh sexy voice,” where, for Isherwood, everything was erotically charged. As he acknowledges in his 1976 autobiography Christopher and His Kind, he “learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners,” so that even the language became “irradiated with sex.” Specifically, Berlin was synonymous with gay male sex, which he stated succinctly in the memoir: “Berlin meant Boys.” Berlin offered a liberating alternative to the paternalistic, gender-bound, offspring-focused familial structures of England.
What Isherwood was looking for in Germany was what he would later refer to as “rough trade”—sexual partners who came from the laboring classes: tough, hypermasculine, “butch” young men of indeterminate sexual orientation. Most of them were queer for cash, as often as not expecting money or gifts in return for sex. For some gay men, the perpetual threat of violence associated with such tough, manly sexual partners—those normally assumed to be the most homophobic—only heightened the pleasure. However, Isherwood justified his attraction by framing it as a revulsion against things English. He claimed that “he couldn’t relax sexually with a member of his own class or nation,” which is why he went in search of “a working-class foreigner.” In a series of interviews over the years, he revisited this issue and speculated on what it was that he found so enticing about these working-class boys. He told Studs Terkel that at the time he “felt the lower class was forthright and less tricky.” He talked with Carolyn Heilbrun about his “sexual colonialism” and preference for lovers of “not only another class, but another race.” And he explained to Winston Leyland that his attraction to these working-class Germans arose from a desire to unmake himself as an upper-middle-class Englishman. Whatever ultimately attracted Isherwood to these rough young men, he was able to make good on his desire to explore this sexual proclivity fully in Germany.
Now, for an Englishman of Isherwood’s era, relocating to Berlin had particular significance against the historical backdrop of Weimar Germany. Berlin between the wars was infamous for its sexual permissiveness. Isherwood built on this reputation in his fiction. In Down There on a Visit, Mr. Lancaster warns the young Isherwood about Berlin: “you couldn’t find anything more nauseating than what goes on there, quite openly, every day. That city is doomed, more surely than Sodom ever was.” Likewise, in Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening, Stephen Monk is struck by the lasciviousness of Berlin. He remembers how during the Weimar Republic the city on the Spree even exceeded Paris in sexual freedom: “In Berlin, it wasn’t enough merely to want sex; you were expected to specialize, to ask for a teen-age virgin, a seventy-year-old woman, a girl with a whip and high boots, a transvestite, a policeman, a pageboy or a dog.”
Other than Isherwood’s fictionalized treatment of Berlin’s sexual diversity, we have a wealth of eyewitness documentation by journalists and other writers suggesting that this was an amazingly vibrant environment for sexual minorities. In The Pink Triangle, a heart-wrenching history of the Nazis’ anti-homosexual pogrom, Richard Plant recapitulates the picture of Weimar Berlin’s gayness that Isherwood had drawn. Berlin’s welcoming attitude toward sexual minorities made the Teutonic capital a magnet for gay people from the rest of Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Plant even attempts to quantify this relative freedom. “By 1914,” he estimates, “there were about forty gay bars in the city,” which would imply quite a sizable gay or gay-friendly population. The situation for female homosexuals, moreover, was even better. Because lesbian sex was not recognized in the German criminal code, lesbians “enjoyed a kind of legal immunity.” In fact, the environment was so free for gay women that there were flourishing “organized lesbian costume balls” and “luxurious lesbian bars and nightclubs.”
At the epicenter of this queer metropolis was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician and social activist who, beginning as early as 1898 and continuing throughout his professional life, campaigned for the elimination of Germany’s Paragraph 175, the ordinance that outlawed male homosexuality. While his theory of homosexuality as constituting a “third sex” seems quaint today, Hirschfeld argued for tolerance and launched a campaign to educate the public about sexual deviants in order to promote sympathy for this minority and a repeal of the discriminatory law. Central to Hirschfeld’s educational agenda was his Institute for Sexual Research, which housed some 20,000 volumes of what Plant described as “rare anthropological, medical, legal, and social documents,” as well as some 35,000 photographs. Tragically, the Nazis ransacked the Institute on May 6, 1933, when Hirschfeld was out of the country. The thugs confiscated and burned the archive and collection. But while it lasted, the Institute was a monument to Berlin’s queerness. And as it happens, Isherwood actually lived at the Hirschfeld Institute when he first moved to Berlin.
England represented to Isherwood all that was conventional and proper, while in Berlin he was suddenly at the nexus of the gayest metropolis in Europe. Yet much as he relished the change from propriety to perversity, it proved a bit too much for him. Once at Hirschfeld’s Institute and surrounded by people with all sorts of exotic erotic inclinations, Isherwood, as he confesses in Christopher and His Kind, “was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs. And he didn’t like it.” The anything-goes, queer ethos of the Institute and its cast of deviant characters “disturbed his latent puritanism.” In a certain way, then, Isherwood’s time in Berlin and at the Institute led him to realize that, while it pained him to admit it, he would always be a part of conventional society. Above all, he discovered he was not the hedonist he initially set himself up to be.
Thus for all his animosity to Britain and its mores, Isherwood was a product of that value system, whereas the sexual freedom of Berlin was more than he was prepared for. An aspect of this conformist side to Isherwood’s character was his tendency to be a little prudish himself. For example, upon encountering the other occupants of the Hirschfeld Institute when he first moved in, Isherwood admits that he was prone to giggling from embarrassment. He acknowledged in an interview many years later that his attitude towards Hirschfeld and his associates was sophomoric and inappropriate: “I laughed at them often, then. Now I see them as heroic and noble.” Similarly, he confesses in Down There on a Visit that once he had had his fun exploring the dens of iniquity of Berlin, he became judgmental of others’ prurience, thereby adding hypocrisy to his priggishness.
Along with this disdain for the oversexed, Isherwood also evinced a rather strong work ethic that belied the bohemian persona which he tried so hard to project. Reflecting on his younger life in Berlin, Isherwood remarks in Christopher and His Kind that “it was characteristic of Christopher that he would accompany” a friend on his nightly rounds of the gay bars, “yet always leave him one third of the way through it, going home quite sober at ten, with or without a bedmate, so as to wake up fresh in the morning to get on with his novel.” He even satirizes himself on this point: “Seldom have wild oats been sown so prudently.” Elsewhere in the autobiography, he recounts how he was shamed into writing by the productivity of “those energetic Americans.”
But if his experience in Berlin taught him that he wasn’t cut out for the life of a hedonist, he learned at the Institute that he did have a “kind,” that he was not alone but belonged to a kind of tribe whose denizens he would later encounter in Berlin’s queer demimonde. The significance of Isherwood finding others like himself cannot be overstated. Even though queer sexuality was not uncommon in his small circle of English friends (notably W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender), the realization that homosexuality spans national borders and social classes was an epiphany for Isherwood when he first visited Germany in 1929, and it would prove critical to his slowly developing activist spirit. One of the fundamental ways that the discovery of a queer tribe emboldened Isherwood was that it provided him with a community. It would be decades before he would formulate a clear picture of this community and what his eventual advocacy on its behalf would entail. His 1964 masterpiece A Single Man—among other things a treatise on the homosexual as isolated and alone—would hint at the need for such a community, a proposition that he developed further in Christopher and His Kind.
The protagonist of A Single Man, George, disdains the prerogative and sense of entitlement his heterosexual neighbors demonstrate. He relishes the challenge his mere existence presents to their view of the world. However, as a bourgeois, suburban academic, George is far from confrontational; he is, in fact, rather staid and boring. And perhaps this dichotomy reflects Isherwood’s own experience of being caught between Britain and Berlin. Isherwood was drawn to the heady queerness of Weimar Berlin, but he responded to the city’s hedonism with mockery and aloofness. He wanted to partake in the available gay male sex, yet he maintained a strong work ethic and disapproval of those who strayed too far from acceptable decorum. Like his character, then, Isherwood seems to have struggled with reconciling respectability and gayness, two irreducible parts of his personality.
References
Berg, James J., and Chris Freeman, eds. Conversations with Christopher Isherwood. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Isherwood, Christopher. Christopher and His Kind: 1929-1939. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976
—. Down There on a Visit. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961.
—. A Single Man. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964.
—. The World in the Evening. Popular Library, 1954.
Plant, Richard. The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals. Henry Holt, 1986.
Timothy K. Nixon PhD is assistant professor of literature in the Dept. of English and Modern Languages at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
