Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years

by Norman Page

Overview

Like Paris in the twenties, 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.

Author Biography: Norman Page is Emeritus Professor of English at Nottingham University in England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333720226
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	08/17/1998
Edition description:	1998
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

NORMAN PAGE is Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and has lectured in many parts of the world. His previous biographies include A.E. Housman: A Critical Biography and Tennyson: An Illustrated Life.

Table of Contents

List of Plates Acknowledgements Preface to the Paperback Edition Prologue: Looking for Berlin Two Young Englishmen Berlin: Places Berlin: Faces The Other Camera: Aspects of Weimar Cinema Writing about Berlin Epilogue: Goodbye to Berlin Bibliography Index

Editorial Reviews

Valuable...readable book is to run the historical-cultural camera backwards...restoring the reality of what the two young Englishmen saw and did.

Washington Times

...illuminating, always informative study of the Berlin milieu in which Auden and Isherwood found themselves shortly before Hitler rose to power.

San Francisco Chronicle

Although the revival of Cabaret makes Page's study timely, the opportunity is mishandled. His visit to the Berlin years of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood reads like a series of rambling academic lectures. Source notes clot the narrative, pronoun references are often vague, and the detailed survey of 1928-1933 urban topography further erodes the narrative. Friends and, briefly, lovers, the two writers escaped to Weimar Berlin to sample its gay clubs and rent boys. Auden, who would visit during holidays, found much inspiration but little of literary value in the sexual turn-ons of the scene. Isherwood would casually mask his experience in the novellas collected as The Berlin Stories (1935-1939), which Page (A.E. Housman) calls "too discreet, too evasive, too readily disposed to encode and displace, to make use of what must have been wonderfully colourful material." That Isherwood's stories were autobiographical fiction rather than autobiography and were written for a more censorious generation, yet inspired the play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret, seems less significant to Page than their less-than-complete exposure of the depression-driven daydream that Berlin seemed to be before the rise of Hitler. From Isherwood's 1977 memoir, Christopher and His Kind, Page quotes the author's rueful confession, "Seldom have wild oats been sown more prudently." This book reflects that disappointment. Photos not seen by PW. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Berlin in the late 1920sbefore Hitler's power surgewas acknowledged to be a city of sexual freedom that was also open to all forms of art and artists. Wystan Auden and Christopher Isherwood were two of those artists who visited Berlin and stayed longer than intended. It wasn't simply that Berlin was accepting of sexual ambiguityand in any case, Auden and Isherwood were not ambiguous in their homosexuality. More importantly, as Page (emeritus, modern English literature, Univ. of Nottingham) makes clear, the city's glittering decadence and aura of untrammeled experimentation fostered Auden's poetry and even more so Isherwood's prose. Page makes his case convincingly by devoting a section of his book to the boy-bars, streets, neighborhoods, houses of Berlin, and to the subculture of transvestism. Page also discusses other personalities operative in Berlin from approximately 1929 to 1933, most notably Magnus Hirschfeld who founded the Institute for Sexology. The final two sections deal with the social impact of the Weimar cinema and the specific writings of each man, with a greater emphasis on Isherwood's autobiographical works. Entertaining and insightful reading; highly recommended.Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN

Library Journal

The book is wide ranging, taking in topography, biography, political and social history, and literary criticism...all with stimulating and informative, and livened by humor and some nice touches of asperity.
—The Times Literary Supplement

Peter Parker

Norman Page's aims in writing this book were, as I believe, modest but very worthwhile. He intended to add to the store of information about this German chapter in British literary history. He intended that the information should be accurate, and purged of romantic and self-serving myths. Most importantly, he wanted to convience his readers that the Berlin years were artistically formative in the careers of two (and possibly three) major British writers. If these were his intentions Page has succeeded, and the proof will be the essential place which Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years will occupy on our shelves.' - John Sutherland The Cambridge Quarterly

'Although quite short, the book is wide-ranging, taking in topography, biography, political and social history, and literary criticism...always stimulating and informative, enlivened by humour and some nice touches of asperity'. - Peter Parker, Times Literary Supplement

'Entertaining and insightful reading, highly recommended'. - Robert Kelly, Library Journal

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