For me, Cabaret will always be about Christopher Isherwood, author of the original “Sally Bowles” story from which Cabaret was later adapted. I recently attended that musical’s revival on Broadway—Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, starring Eddie Redmayne as the Emcee, Gayle Rankin as Sally Bowles, and Ato Blankson-Wood as the Americanized author-character Clifford Bradshaw. Tom Scutt’s theatre design transformed the August Wilson Theatre into an immersive experience, a cabaret before the cabaret, leading viewers and voyeurs through a dark alleyway and down into a deco-inspired club, its interior golden-hued like a setting sun, to the late-nights of late Weimar Berlin. “Where are your troubles now?” the Emcee entices.
We are nearing the centennial of Isherwood’s liberating journey in 1929 from conservative England to liberal Berlin. By 1933, however, over four short years, he witnessed the devastating farewell to Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, documented in his 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, the original inspiration for adaptations into a play and film by John van Druten, called I Am a Camera, which became the basis for the 1966 long-running musical and 1972 film, Cabaret.
“I am a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording,” Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical narrator Christopher famously declares. Through the frame of this metaphorical camera, whether then or now, we recognize where our troubles are.
At the close of Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher recounts his final days in Germany. It is spring—March, 1933—the sun shines and the trains run and the cafés are busy. It looks like a photograph of “something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past”—except a liberal pacifist book publisher is raided by the Nazis; gay nightclubs are policed; and violence against Jewish businesses is on the rise.
In his memoir of the 1930s, Christopher and His Kind (1976), Isherwood recalls the atmosphere after new elections in March 1933 (“the mock-elections,” he writes in Goodbye to Berlin) in which the Nazis gained significant seats in the German parliament—not with a “clear majority” but enough to make it the largest party in the parliament. Hitler, already appointed Chancellor by a pressured president, quickly passed the Enabling Act, allowing him to pass laws without parliamentary consent. It was the final goodbye to democracy. Like a still life, Christopher captures people sitting in cafés, “vaguely curious, complacent, accepting what had happened but not the responsibility for it.”
It’s all too much, the locals say in the novel. They feel powerless to act. What can be done?
With its balance between the understated and the exaggerated, the comical and grotesque, the violent and elegiac, Goodbye to Berlin is a poignant snapshot of a waning democracy as it documents the transition from a free-thinking society to an intolerant one—the banning of books, ideas, and bodies in the culture war that aimed to end all culture wars.
Recent book bans in the U.S. and the moral panics that give rise to them have similarly escalated to laws that limit free expression. Eighteen states have passed bills to restrict teaching Critical Race Theory and to limit the accurate teaching of U.S. history in schools, with still more bills under consideration. Similar legislation, as in Florida, prohibits language on gender and sexuality in the classroom, including books with gay characters. Most concerning are bills that restrict self-expression, especially for transgender youth. We are already seeing bans against bodily autonomy.
What begin as attacks on specific groups enables and emboldens authoritarians. By the end of Goodbye to Berlin, the narrator notes that the newspapers read “like copies of a school magazine . . . with new rules and regulations.”
The closing of the pacifist book store in Isherwood’s novel is not mere metaphor for “culture wars.” Nor, certainly, are political clashes. Nor bans against the queer community, or violent racism in all its forms.
Christopher Isherwood’s life and writing remind us that culture wars begin with culture, but they end with people.
Just before Isherwood’s final departure from Berlin in May 1933, he witnessed the infamous Nazi book burnings after the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Research, founded in 1919 by Jewish gay rights activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Anti-Semitic laws had begun a month earlier restricting Jewish participation in government, universities, schools, and professions. Hirschfeld’s Institute was additionally home to gay, bisexual, and trans people, among others. It was where Isherwood moved into his first Berlin apartment in 1929.
Within weeks of the attacks on the Institute and the book burnings, the Nazis passed Paragraph 219a in the German Penal Code, which prohibited doctors from providing women with information on abortion, a law that for nearly a century was used to prosecute physicians and limit women’s access to healthcare. It was only recently overturned. Once a law is passed, it can take years—decades, generations—to reverse, even long after the authoritarians who enacted it have been removed from power.
The 1930s stayed with Isherwood. Over the next four decades, in three novels and a memoir, that era would return as he reflected often on power and oppression. There is a feeling of urgency in Goodbye to Berlin as Isherwood examines how democracy can be so quickly dismantled, written as the crisis was unfolding in the 1930s, but his subsequent sojourns to that era examine enduring causes and effects: how language is mobilized to control bodies, how rules are enacted to immobilize resistance.
Goodbye to Berlin is populated with characters Isherwood referred to as “the Lost,” including those “already marked down as Hitler’s victims,” and those “whom respectable Society regards as moral outcasts.” The most recognizable outcast is Sally Bowles, still famous after all these years on the stage of Cabaret. It is her sexuality that places her outside “respectability,” namely her affairs with men, one of which leads to an unwanted pregnancy and subsequent abortion.
The portrayal of Sally was inspired by Isherwood’s real-life friend, Jean Ross, who at the young age of 19, moved from England to Berlin to see what freedoms it had to offer. Ross was a “New Woman,” cross-dressed in cropped hair and pants, finding work in cabarets and choice in life abroad.
I recently read Goodbye to Berlin with a class I taught on literature and gender. I was interested in the way Sally consistently arranges her body, ever self-conscious of how she is seen, of how she performs femininity. It is as if Sally is following stage cues on what it supposedly means to be a woman, a parody of despicable demands for both naïveté and sexiness. She is an object of exchange between men, but so obviously so, that it becomes a form of critique in the novel—the laying bare of patriarchal heterosexism.
My students did and did not read Sally this way. They were frustrated at her portrayal, a response Ross herself shared. Sally was so clearly the male writer’s unconscious stereotype of women. They did not like to see her treated as an object of sexism and misogyny, both by other characters in the novel, and by Isherwood the author.
Students wrote back to the novel in anger, sharing Sally’s own criticism of the narrator’s superficial portrayal of “the English girl” in an article Christopher writes for a magazine. Sally might be sketched as trivial, but she also recognizes the limited options she has in life. She knows that by herself she cannot financially support a child, and she knows she is simultaneously judged for not having “Great Love, Home and Children.”
When Isherwood finished the draft of “Sally Bowles” in 1936, his editor John Lehmann at Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, worried over Sally’s abortion scene. Lehmann feared a libel trial in England since the experience was not fiction. Ross granted permission to publish the story of her illegal abortion, from which she nearly died.
It is no wonder that Sally Bowles has struck a chord in today’s Cabaret revival.
Lehmann’s other worry was whether the censors would find the reference “obscene.” It was a similar fear that prevented Isherwood from making any explicit reference in his Berlin stories to his narrator’s sexuality.
Isherwood had already been out of Germany for two years when the Nazis strengthened the law Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality. This was 1935, when increasingly persecutory anti-Semitic laws were passed.
But anti-homosexual laws existed too in England. The potential for arrest and a public trial were as possible there, and elsewhere in Europe, as well as in the U.S.
Then, in 1936, the Nazis established the Reich Committee to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion. If Sally Bowles were German and not English, her body would be made to serve the reproduction of race and nation.
To write an abortion scene set in the heart of Germany at a moment when it was fully banned must have felt like an act of resistance, particularly since Isherwood was under duress trying to keep his German boyfriend, Heinz Neddermeyer, from conscription in Hitler’s army. Isherwood was running out of options. Heinz had been denied a visa to England as well as to several other countries. As homosexuals, they had no safe refuge.
In 1937, Heinz was arrested, charged with evading conscription and committing homosexual acts. He was sentenced to prison, forced labor, and service to the army. Isherwood only later learned that Heinz had faced a greater danger as tens of thousands of homosexuals were sent to concentration camps.
Heinz survived the war, but his earlier story of course could not be written into Goodbye to Berlin. And though neither Isherwood nor many of his readers could know in 1939 the full extent of the horrors of the “final solution” to which fascist ideology and practice lead, we certainly do.
In 2018, I was invited to Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary, as an external examiner on a Ph.D. dissertation defense written on the life and work of Christopher Isherwood. The timing was notable. This defense was understood to be the last in the Gender Studies program at the Budapest-based CEU. Hungary’s increasingly-authoritarian prime minister had targeted the program as an “ideology,” banning its accreditation in Hungary. Terms can be deployed by users to whatever ends seem most expedient. To label the academic study of gender and sexuality as an ideology is to deny it any scientific basis or intellectual or historical precedent. It is to restrict the exercise of freedom of thought and critical understanding of the spectrum of human difference.
To label gender studies as ideology also makes it easier to call it propaganda and indoctrination. We hear these same accusations in anti-LGBTQ legislation today. Similar rhetoric has been used to introduce bans on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in more than half of U.S. states.
Isherwood’s original title for Goodbye to Berlin, “The Lost,” included the persecuted, but also those “being herded blindly into the future by their Nazi shepherds”—the anti-Semitic boarders who rented rooms in the same building as Christopher and the eugenic doctor at a beach vacation who sees gay young men as “degenerate.”
But there were also the everyday Germans, the beloved Fraulein Shroeder, owner of the boarding house where Christopher and Sally rented rooms, just trying to survive an inflation that had bankrupted so many.
At the end of Frecknall’s Cabaret, all of the characters stand in a circle on the rotating stage, ambiguously clothed in trench coats as the light fades, “like a very good photograph,” as Isherwood puts it in Goodbye to Berlin.
There were culture wars. There was racist ideology and radical conservatism. There was a feeling of powerlessness, which the authoritarians needed. There was a loss of democracy, through legal means.
The same day the German Parliament voted to overturn Paragraph 219a, the Nazi-era censorship against providing abortion information to women in need, the conservative-majority Supreme Court of the United States voted to overturn Americans’ constitutional right to access abortion care and protections for reproductive freedom.
The sun is shining. The cafés are open. People voted for the new regime, or did not vote at all.
“How could they be responsible?”
