Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years

Like Paris in the '20s, Berlin in the early thirties was one of the most exciting cities in the world. As the Weimar Republic sputtered to a close and war loomed on the horizon, the city was a magnet for talented writers and artists. It was in this now-vanished time and place that W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lived, wrote and slept together.

Norman Page tells the story of how these years shaped these important writers and, in doing so, illuminates a bygone era.
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 Berlin Stories were the basis for Cabaret) 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 The Blue Angel 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 Using Isherwood's Christopher and His Kind and Auden's unpublished diaries, Page brings new insights to both these writers and an era that had a profound formative effect on their lives and work.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