The novel recounts Isherwood's 1929–1932 sojourn as a pleasure-seeking British expatriate on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany and consists of a "series of sketches of disintegrating Berlin, its slums and nightclubs and comfortable villas, its odd maladapted types and its complacent burghers.
[8] Anne Margaret Angus praised Isherwood's mastery in conveying the despair of Berlin's denizens and "their hopeless clinging to the pleasures of the moment".
[12][13] The autobiographical novel recounts writer Christopher Isherwood's sojourn in Jazz Age Berlin and describes the pre-Nazi social milieu as well as the colourful personalities he encountered.
[3] At the time, a young Isherwood was wholly indifferent to the growing spectre of fascism,[14] and he had moved to Berlin in order to avail himself of boy prostitutes and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.
[15][16] While residing in the city, Isherwood socialised with a coterie of expatriates that included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Edward Upward, and Paul Bowles.
The novel's most memorable character—the "divinely decadent"[21][22] Sally Bowles—was based upon 19-year-old flapper Jean Ross with whom Isherwood shared lodgings at Nollendorfstraße 17 in Schöneberg.
She sang badly,[c] without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides—yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her.
[17][33] Instead, a 27-year-old Isherwood settled into a same-sex relationship with a 16-year-old German boy named Heinz Neddermeyer,[34][35] while Ross entered into a variety of heterosexual liaisons, including one with the blond musician Peter van Eyck, the future star of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear.
[51] For the remainder of her life, Ross believed the public association of herself with the naïve and apolitical character of Sally Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist.
[52] [Jean Ross] never liked Goodbye to Berlin, nor felt any sense of identity with the character of Sally Bowles ... She never cared enough, however, to be moved to any public rebuttal.
"[53] Due to her unyielding dislike of fascism, Ross was incensed that Isherwood had depicted her as thoughtlessly allied in her beliefs "with the attitudes which led to Dachau and Auschwitz".
[53] In the early 21st century, some writers have argued the antisemitic remarks in "Sally Bowles" are a reflection of Isherwood's own much-documented racial prejudices.
[e][57] According to biographer Peter Parker, Isherwood was "fairly anti-Semitic to a degree that required some emendations of the Berlin novels when they were republished after the war".
The 'wickedness' of Berlin's night-life was of the most pitiful kind; the kisses and embraces, as always, had price-tags attached to them.... As for the 'monsters', they were quite ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods.
At the boarding house, he interacts with the other tenants, including the brazen prostitute Fräulein Kost, who has a Japanese patron, and the decadent Sally Bowles, a young English flapper who sings tunelessly in a seedy cabaret called "The Lady Windermere".
Due to a mutual lack of funds, Christopher and Sally soon become roommates,[f] and he learns a great deal about her sex life as well as her coterie of "marvelous" lovers.
Ultimately, Christopher is forced to leave Germany as the Nazis continue their ascent to power, and he fears that many of his beloved Berlin acquaintances are now dead.
If he were not, these sketches of pre-Hitlerian Berlin (the Nazi regime is coming into force when the book closes) would make still sadder reading, for all around is poverty, suspicion, and the threat of violence.
"[89] Critic Anne Margaret Angus praised Isherwood's mastery in conveying the ingravescent despair of Berlin's denizens, "with their febrile emotionalism" and "their hopeless clinging to the pleasures of the moment".
"[10] In her book Anti-Nazi Modernism: The Challenges of Resistance in 1930s Fiction, author Mia Spiro remarks that "despite that which they could not know, the novels that Barnes, Isherwood, and Woolf wrote do reveal the historical, cultural, political, and social conditions in 1930s Europe that made the continent ripe for disaster".
The play was a personal success for Julie Harris as the insouciant Sally Bowles, winning her the first of her five Tony Awards for Best Leading Actress, although it earned the infamous review by Walter Kerr, "Me no Leica.
[59] The play was then adapted into a commercially successful film, also called I Am a Camera (1955), featuring Laurence Harvey, Shelley Winters and Julie Harris, with screenplay by John Collier and music by Malcolm Arnold.
[92][93] According to literary critics, the character of Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin inspired Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in his later novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.