ON EITHER side of the stage two rubber-clad girls gyrate under showers of fake blood. At the bar a Stephanie Powers lookalike, who is actually called Jerome, orders another champagne. By the pool outside, a man dressed as a zombie sings along to a miniature banjo while sitting in a barber’s chair. Just another Saturday night in a Berlin nightclub. Apart from a few details, such as the transvestites’ hairstyles or whatever illicit substance is in vogue, it is an atmosphere that Christopher Isherwood would not have found so different from that of the hedonistic Berlin of the early 1930s.
Every city has its mythmakers. For Berlin, it is Isherwood, who was born 100 years ago this month. His novel, Goodbye to Berlin, set in the years before Hitler came to power, formed the basis of the stage show and movie Cabaret and sealed Berlin’s reputation as a decadent centre of creative hedonism. Perhaps his best-loved creation was Sally Bowles, the rather hit-and-miss vamp. Tonight the drinking is being done in the Sage Club. I am here to meet Dahlia Schweitzer, whose dream is to be a modern-day Sally Bowles. “I consider my act to be more of a cabaret than a typical rock show. The inspiration for all my parties has been the cabaret of 1930s Berlin,” she says.
In the few shining years between Prussian pomp and Nazi nihilism, the cabaret scene played a key role in the city’s social life, from shows bordering on the pornographic, to biting political satires of Hitler’s Putsches. What they all had in common was a fascination with performance, still a characteristic aspect of Berlin nightlife.
Watching Dahlia’s show, I can see that the sexy trashiness of the performance and the drunken enthusiasm of the crowd is probably much closer to Isherwood’s world than the bland Kurt Weill reconstructions peddled to tourists.
But why has Dahlia left New York to come and live in Berlin? “Where else could I move where the rent is so cheap and you have this creative energy? I mean, I could move to Ohio but you don’t have the energy, the clubs, the nightlife, the staying-out-till-eight-in-the-morning type of decadence.” Looking round the club, where a DJ of indeterminate sex is mixing records while two girls kiss on the dance floor, I can see that Ohio might seem tame in comparison.
Advertisement
Berlin’s low cost of living was what made the city an attractive destination for struggling artists in the Weimar Republic. The hyper-inflation of the inter-war period in Germany meant that creative types with foreign incomes could survive on a fraction of what they would have needed back home, giving them time to focus on their art. According to Dahlia it is the same today. “I think in New York the odds are against you creatively. Everything costs more money than you have. You never have the time to even get started doing what you want to do.”
If Berliners have anything, it is time. There is an awful lot of hanging around in cafés going on. With many Germans studying well into their late twenties and an unemployment rate of about 20 per cent in the city, nowhere is it more socially acceptable to do little than here. As long as you have some sort of “project” to work on, that is.
Isherwood came to Berlin not to hang around and drink coffee, although he did that as well, but to write. He had already published one book when he moved to Berlin in November 1929. He stayed until May 1933 and it was the material which he gathered in Berlin and made into two novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye To Berlin (1939), that brought him recognition as one of the most promising young writers of his generation. Almost every English-speaking writer I meet in the city seems to have aspirations to carry on where Isherwood left off. I suppose there is something attractive about documenting hedonism; as if you can achieve literary fame by going out lots. In reality Isherwood often left parties early so that he could get up to write the next day. “Seldom have wild oats been sown so prudently,” as he later recalled.
Nevertheless a few wild oats did get sown, as the other reason that Isherwood came to Berlin was to explore his own sexuality. As he puts it rather bluntly in his autobiography Christopher and his Kind, “Berlin meant boys”. At the time the city was unparalleled as a centre of sexual freedom and, until the Nazis came to power in 1933 and put a stop to the party, Berlin was estimated to have 400 gay bars. Isherwood’s theory was that, “Paris had long since cornered the straight girl-market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?” Isherwood’s school friend W. H. Auden encouraged Isherwood to join him in Berlin by writing regular reports on his naughty adventures.
Today Berlin is once again a centre of gay life. Isherwood’s old neighbourhood, around Nollendorfstrasse, is about as heterosexual as Old Compton Street. The myth of today’s Berlin has become so intertwined with Isherwood’s stories that it is sometimes hard to work out which came first. Does the city’s seedy glamour come across so well in Isherwood’s work because he was describing Berlin’s eternal character? Or has Isherwood played a role in creating today’s bohemian Berlin by attracting the weird and the wonderful, all looking to live out his stories for themselves? Probably a bit of both. But as long as you cannot tell whether the DJ is a man or a woman and the pole dancers are still doing acrobatics on the bar, the myth seems real enough.