Christopher and His Kind

by Christopher Isherwood

  Nevertheless, there was terror in the Berlin air—the terror felt by many people with good reason—and Christopher found himself affected by it. Perhaps he was also affected by his own fantasies. He had always posed a little to his friends in England as an embattled fighter against the Nazis and some of them had encouraged him jokingly to do so. “Don’t get killed before I come,” Edward Upward had written, “I’ll see you unless you’ve been shot by Hitler.” Now Christopher began to have mild hallucinations. He fancied that he heard heavy wagons drawing up before the house, in the middle of the night. He suddenly detected swastika patterns in the wallpaper. He convinced himself that everything in his room, whatever its superficial color, was basically brown, Nazi brown.

  * * *

  Christopher had much more cause to worry on behalf of his two intended traveling companions. German citizens now had to get individual permits to leave the country. It was possible, though unlikely, that Heinz would have difficulty. But Erwin Hansen might well be refused and perhaps arrested into the bargain, as a Communist and as an employee of the Hirschfeld Institute. Erwin smiled at Christopher’s fears, saying that the Nazis were too busy to bother about small fry such as himself. (A dangerously optimistic notion, for the Terror was still badly organized and therefore unpredictable in its choice of victims.) Meanwhile, until he could start for Greece, Erwin insisted on continuing to live at the Institute, as its janitor.

  On May 6, the Institute was raided by a party of about a hundred students. They arrived in trucks, early in the morning, playing a brass band. Hearing the band, Erwin looked out of a window and—hoping to prevent some of the obviously impending damage—asked them politely to wait a moment while he came downstairs to unlock the doors. But the students preferred to enter like warriors; they smashed the doors down and rushed into the building. They spent the morning pouring ink over carpets and manuscripts and loading their trucks with books from the Institute’s library, including many which had nothing to do with sex: historical works, art journals, etc. In the afternoon, a troop of S.A. men arrived and made a more careful search, evidently knowing what they were looking for. (It has been stated, since then, that some well-known members of the Nazi Party had previously been patients of Hirschfeld and that they were afraid that case histories revealing their homosexuality might be used against them. But, if this was so, they would surely have had the Institute’s archives examined more discreetly. Christopher was later told that all the really important papers and books had been removed by friends of Hirschfeld and sent abroad, sometime before this.) A few days after the raid, the seized books and papers were publicly burned, along with a bust of Hirschfeld, on the square in front of the Opera House. Christopher, who was present in the crowd, said, “Shame!”; but not loudly.

  The government then formally deprived Hirschfeld of his German citizenship. He was living in Nice and planning to reopen the Institute there. But he died before he could do so, on May 15, 1935. After his death, Karl Giese left France and went to Czechoslovakia. In 1936, he killed himself.

  * * *

  “I’m sure I don’t know what makes you want to leave Berlin all of a sudden, like this,” Frl. Thurau told Christopher sadly, with perfect sincerity. She, who had voted Communist—because of Christopher’s urging—in the November 1932 elections, now called Hitler “Der Fuehrer” when she talked to the porter’s wife. After all, like millions of others, she had to go on living in Germany and making the best of it, no matter who was in power. She would remain what she essentially was, a sweet, muddled victim of her rulers—guilty only by association with them—no more and no less of a Nazi than she had been a Communist.

  When John van Druten wrote I Am a Camera, he thought it dramatically necessary to make his hitherto sympathetic landlady character speak out against the Jews, in the last act. He wanted to show that she was becoming influenced by Nazi propaganda. He also wanted to give the Christopher character a chance to rebuke her severely, thereby demonstrating the awakening of his conscience. Christopher approved the logic of this, while finding the Christopher character’s conscience somewhat nauseating; it was so pleased with its own earnestness, so preachy. And he squirmed when the Christopher character had his moment of nobility, fistfighting the Nazis. But to protest would have been ungrateful. He had put himself willingly and gladly into van Druten’s hands. And he himself could never have made an acceptable Broadway play out of this material.

  Nevertheless, he was concerned about Frl. Thurau. She might one day see I Am a Camera. (It was in fact translated and performed in Germany.) She might think that Christopher was accusing her of anti-Semitism through van Druten’s mouth, and be deeply hurt. Even if she had attacked the Jews—she is never made to do so in the novels—it would have been utterly indecent for Christopher to have played her prosecutor. He therefore asked van Druten to change the landlady’s name from Schroeder (as in the novels) to Schneider. Christopher tried to convince himself at the time that this minor adjustment would reassure Frl. Thurau that the landlady in the play wasn’t intended to be a portrait of her, as Frl. Schroeder was … It is painfully clear to me now that this was one of those compromises which private guilt makes with the box office.

  In February 1952, Christopher returned to Berlin on a short visit, for the first time since the war. With Heinz and Heinz’s wife, he went to see Frl. Thurau. She was still living on the Nollendorfstrasse, but in a much smaller flat. There were smashed buildings along the familiar street and most of the house fronts were pitted by bomb fragments and eaten by decay. Christopher hadn’t announced his arrival in advance, and now he felt suddenly afraid that the shock of seeing him might upset her. He asked Heinz and his wife to go upstairs ahead of him. Standing back in the shadows of the staircase, he listened to Heinz greeting Frl. Thurau and then starting to break the news … We’ve heard Christoph is back in England … He might be coming over here, they say … Very soon … Who knows, perhaps he’s here already?… Frl. Thurau had guessed, by this time. When Christopher appeared, she uttered a tremendous scream, a scream worthy of Tristan and Isolde, equally appropriate for death or bliss. It must have been heard all over the building.

  As was to be expected, she was now enthusiastically pro-American; the Nollendorfstrasse was in the American occupation sector. Her feelings toward the Russians were mixed. She spoke of their politics with conventional disapproval and of their sexual appetites with grudging respect. Immediately after the war’s end, she had met many Russian soldiers. “Every time I went out on the street they’d be after me,” she told Christopher, with a certain complacency. “So I used to screw up my eyes—like this—and make a hump on my back, and limp. You ought to have seen me, Herr Issyvoo. Then even those Russians didn’t want me any more. I looked like a regular old hag!” She looked better now, in her seventies, than she had in her fifties—despite all she had been through. Christopher asked her about the bombing. “Oh, the last year was terrible! We were in the cellar nearly all the time. We used to hold each other in our arms and say at least we’d all die together. I can tell you, Herr Issyvoo, we prayed so much we got quite religious!”

  When they said goodbye, Frl. Thurau gave him the brass dolphin clockstand, holding a clock on its tail, which is described in Goodbye to Berlin and about which “Isherwood” asks himself: “What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed?” A prophetic comment—for a bomb blast had hurled it across the room and only slightly scratched its green marble base. It stands ticking away on my desk, as good as new, while I write these words.

  EIGHT

  Christopher had told Stephen in a letter:

  If we do go to Greece, I shall write a book as much like Hindoo Holiday as possible. This will pay for everything for the next ten years.

  Joe Ackerley’s Hindoo Holiday had been published in 1932. He was a close friend of Forster and of Plomer, but I don’t think Christopher had met him yet. Christopher had admired Hindoo Holiday and wasn’t intending to sneer at it. All he meant by
his remark to Stephen was that he wanted to write a light, funny, salable travelogue.

  Now, on the point of departure, Christopher started a diary, in the hope that it would provide him with material for this projected book.

  May 13, 1933. It is a quarter past midnight and I have just finished packing. In eight hours I am going to leave Berlin, perhaps for ever. The paper says there has been an earthquake in Greece. I am not exactly tired, I feel only as if I were convalescent from a severe illness. For days I have worried, worried whether Heinz would get his passport, whether Erwin would be arrested, whether they will remember to call us in the hotel in Belgrade to catch the Athens train. I have already made the journey several times in my head, composed funny postcards to all my friends. And now the day which seemed too good, too bad to be true, the day when I should leave Germany, has arrived, and I only know about the Future that, however often and however variously I have imagined it to myself, the reality will be quite quite different.

  That last long pompously false sentence is produced by Christopher’s feeling that he ought to make some statement befitting the importance of the situation. It is false because it is out of character. I don’t believe he ever imagined the day on which he would leave Germany; that suggests a calm foresight of which he was incapable. He was a worrier, not a foreseer. That part of his will over which he had no conscious control—he would have called it “circumstances”—swept him blindly into the future, often kicking, sometimes screaming.

  * * *

  When Edward Upward heard what Christopher’s destination was, he had written:

  Tell me the details and whether it is possible to live on an island for nothing and for ever. If it is I’ll come.

  But even as I say so my foredoomed function comes down on me like an iron extinguisher from the ceiling. I’ve got to stay here. Otherwise the guns will never fire again. They haven’t fired yet this term. I’ve written a lot of The Border Line in my head but not one word on paper.

  Three nights a week go regularly to party work—worthless to the party but it will be very valuable some day to my writing. And on an average one afternoon a week goes to the party too. It would be very easy for me not to have any spare time at all.

  (Edward was then teaching at Dulwich and going to Communist Party meetings. The Border Line, on which he was working, was to become his first novel. It was published in 1938, as Journey to the Border.)

  Does this sound like a voice from the sewer? Every day I develop more and more into my opposite. Holidays reverse the process, hence the awful birth pangs at the beginning of each term.

  I see now, suddenly, what it was that seemed so obscurely tremendous about your original remark about our functions: you go to Greece because it’s your opposite and I am here because this is mine. If we’d never met at Cambridge the roles would have been reversed and we should both have been very unhappy.

  Edward meant that he was designed by nature to be a romantically footloose traveler and that Christopher was designed to be a humdrum stay-at-home, devoted to some daily duty. Their encounter had had the effect of changing each other’s life roles and of helping each to find his proper subject matter as a writer. I think this was more or less true.

  * * *

  Heinz came round to pick Christopher up at six. Heinz hadn’t been to bed at all because he had been afraid he would oversleep. They met Erwin on the platform of the Anhalter Station. He rolled up to them red-eyed, having drunk a bottle and a half of cognac, and greeted them with the Communist clenched fist, in defiance of the onlookers.

  The train took them southward to the Czechoslovak border, by way of the valley of the Elbe, where they saw a hammer and sickle daubed in red paint on a cliff face above the river; the Nazis had much landscape cleaning of this kind still to do. At the border, Christopher watched tensely as the German officials examined the passports of Erwin and Heinz and at length admitted that they were in order. His own British passport had been returned to him after the merest glance.

  When filling out the passport application, Heinz had asked how he should describe his profession. Christopher had told him to write Hausdiener (domestic servant). I suppose Christopher felt that Heinz ought to proclaim himself an unashamed proletarian, instead of hiding behind some bourgeois label such as student or Privat (of independent means). Anyhow, this proved to have been a fatally silly piece of advice.

  * * *

  They reached Prague that afternoon. The hotel was full of refugees from Germany. The wearing of Nazi badges was forbidden by the police. Compared with Berlin, the city seemed ancient, picturesquely untidy, loud with tram clatter and taxi tooting, rather French. I have never forgotten the dark little fourteenth-century synagogue, full of candle smoke, where you felt you could smell the Middle Ages.

  Next day, they took the train on to Vienna. Erwin had some friends there, members of the League for Sexual Reform, a Hirschfeld-inspired organization. They wanted, of course, to hear all about the closing of the Institute. Erwin, not unnaturally, presented himself as the central martyr in the drama. This irritated Christopher:

  I get bored with Erwin when he starts being the heroic exile. We all know that the Nazis are behaving like swine, but why such a fuss. Fussing is for emigrés, not for Communists.

  Christopher was charmed by Vienna—by the soft-spoken language of the Viennese, by the many fountains, by the Prater with its big wheel. He thought he would like to live there. John Lehmann, whom they saw on the sixteenth, encouraged him to do so. On the seventeenth, they moved on to Budapest. In a restaurant overlooking the Danube, they ate goulash, drank Tokay, and had a fiddle played within a millimeter of their ears, gypsy-style. After which they embarked on a river steamer for Belgrade.

  As they steamed down the wide brown river, Christopher kept repeating to himself that they were entering the Balkans—a romantically dangerous region of blood feuds and (so he had been told) male marriages celebrated by priests. Arriving late the next evening in Belgrade, they found a café where

  a dark girl with a mustache kept up a harsh, extremely dramatic shouting to the accompaniment of the tambourine. We drank wine and coffee out of dolls’ coffee cups.

  Early in the morning of May 19, they caught the Athens train:

  The country was like England, with very beautiful trees. I’d expected palms. Beyond Skopje the brown mountains, the straw hats, the jet-eyed children with their heads bound in crimson rags. Soldiers with fixed bayonets along the line. Rain, heavy and cold. As it got dark, the empty train rushed through the deserted country, guarded by solitary armed men, towards the frontier.

  May 20. We arrived at noon. Francis was on the platform to meet us, with a boy named Tasso. “Hullo, lovey,” he said, “I never expected you’d come.” He has syphilis again. We sat for hours and hours in a café while the rain swilled down the streets. We couldn’t drink the turpentine wine nor eat the potatoes like soap, but there were strawberries. Everybody has a string of yellow beads to play with. Tasso has one fingernail, on the little finger of the left hand, which he has allowed to grow enormously long. This, says Francis, is fashionable. Tasso is very gay and makes little paper boats. Afterwards Heinz and I went back to our hotel. Tomorrow the island.

  * * *

  The island on which Francis was building his house is called St. Nicholas. It lies in the strait between the island of Euboea and the coast of the mainland, close to the shore, just north of the city of Chalkis. It is about a kilometer long.

  Francis had rented St. Nicholas from the inhabitants of the nearest mainland village, who were its part owners. He had a lease on it for ten years at the rate of three pounds a year. Later, he hoped to persuade the villagers to sell it to him. Francis had decided to live on St. Nicholas because there was a tumulus just behind the beach opposite the island which was said to contain the remnants of one or more prehistoric villages. Its surface was littered with bits of pottery. Francis was already trying to get an authorization from the British School in Athens to
excavate the tumulus. (As far as I know, he never did get this authorization. His name was becoming increasingly disreputable in official circles.)

  The description of life on St. Nicholas in Down There on a Visit is taken directly from Christopher’s diary. But the Englishman called Geoffrey is largely fictitious and the visit of Maria Constantinescu never happened. Waldemar, the boy who arrives from Germany with “Isherwood,” isn’t in the least a portrait of Heinz; he is a mere second edition of the character of Otto Nowak. “Isherwood” treats Waldemar very much as he treats Otto in Goodbye to Berlin, with condescending amusement and without any suggestion that they are seriously involved.

  Christopher didn’t fully realize, at first, what a great nervous strain he was under, what an effort he was making to endure this place. St. Nicholas was like nothing he had ever experienced before. He was accustomed to say that he loved sunshine, and so he did, at some northern resort with comfortable lodgings into which he could retreat when he had had enough. But now here he was, transplanted from Frl. Schroeder’s dark flat to a tent in the midst of this blazing sun-smitten outdoors—so beautiful with its encircling sea and mountains, so nearly uninhabitable with its heat, dirt, bad food and worse water, stinging flies and yelling Greeks. How could he ever have imagined he could work on his novel here?