Berlin is portrayed by Isherwood during this chaotic interwar period as a carnival of debauchery and despair inhabited by desperate people who are unaware of the national catastrophe that awaits them.

The first novel focuses on the misadventures of Arthur Norris, a character based upon an unscrupulous businessman named Gerald Hamilton whom Isherwood met in the Weimar Republic.

[5] He regretted depicting many persons as "monsters" and noted they were "ordinary human beings prosaically engaged in getting their living through illegal methods.

[6] I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.The events depicted in The Berlin Stories are derived from Isherwood's colorful escapades in the Weimar Republic.

[11][12] He had relocated to Berlin to pursue a hedonistic life as an openly gay man and to enjoy the city's orgiastic Jazz Age cabarets.

[17] In Berlin during Winter 1930–1931, Isherwood met Gerald Hamilton, an unscrupulous businessman who inspired the fictional character of Arthur Norris.

[1] Like the fictional character which he inspired, Hamilton was regarded by his fellow British expatriates to be a "nefarious, amoral, sociopathic, manipulative conniver" who "did not hesitate to use or abuse friends and enemies alike.

In those days, Christopher felt certain that she was exaggerating... Due to his limited finances, Isherwood shared modest lodgings in Berlin with 19-year-old Jean Ross,[c] a British cabaret singer who inspired the fictional character of Sally Bowles.

She sang badly,[d] 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.

'"[34] However, following Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Isherwood finally noticed the sinister developments occurring within the country,[23] and he commented to a friend: "Adolf, with his rectangular black moustache, has come to stay and brought all his friends.... Nazis are to be enrolled as 'auxiliary police,' which means that one must now not only be murdered but that it is illegal to offer any resistance.

"[23] Two weeks after Hitler passed the Enabling Act which cemented his power, Isherwood fled Germany and returned to England on 5 April 1933.

His 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin was later adapted by playwright John Van Druten into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera and, ultimately, the 1966 Cabaret musical.

While traveling on a train from the Netherlands to Germany, British expatriate William Bradshaw meets a nervous-looking man named Arthur Norris.

Norris uses Bradshaw as a decoy to get an aristocratic friend, Baron Pregnitz, to take a holiday in Switzerland and meet "Margot" under the guise of a Dutchman.

At the boarding house, he interacts with the other tenants including the frank prostitute Fräulein Kost who has a Japanese patron and the divinely decadent Sally Bowles, a young Englishwoman who sings in a seedy cabaret.

Ultimately, the narrator 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.

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.