- Paperback: 232 pages
- Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; New Ed edition (8 Mar 2000)
- ISBN-10: 033380399X
- ISBN-13: 978-0333803998
- Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 13.8 x 1.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,466,130 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Review
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
Product Description
The young W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood spent, between them, the years 1928 to 1933 in Berlin. It was a period momentous in public history, witnessing the end of the Weimar Republic and the coming to power of the Nazis, but it was also a crucial stage in the development of the two young Englishmen as individuals and as writers. During their Berlin years, both discovered the paths along which the rest of their lives would be lived, including a gay identity and a sense of permanent exile from country and class. Drawing on much contemporary material, including Auden's remarkable unpublished diary, this book places personal experience in the context of the life of a great city; not only its political, artistic and cultural life, but the life of the streets, bars and cafes. It presents portraits of figures, often fascinating in their own right, with whom Auden and Isherwood came into contact, and it demonstrates how, especially in Isherwood's fiction, the raw material of daily existence was transformed into art. The wide scope of this study, which ranges from poetry and cinema to street violence and prostitution, provides a richly detailed context for its account of two writers engaged in the process of self-definition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
This book covers exactly what it says in the title - the Berlin of these two writers between the years 1928 and 1933, describing how people, places and even the cinema of the time are reflected in the poems, plays and novels of Auden and Isherwood. There is an abundance of well-researched information on topics the subjects may have glossed tactfully over in their writings (in particular, the proposition that 'Berlin meant Boys' is thoroughly examined), and Page's style is frequently witty. One also discovers what happened afterwards to the people and locations which feature in 'Goodbye to Berlin'. In all, a scholarly work in just 212 pages - and 11 black-and-white photographs.
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2 reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Seeds sown in the soil of turmoil
4 May 2001
Format:Hardcover
Books of fiction and nonfiction, films, paintings, and museums abound in the ongoing ceaseless inspection of the atrocity and madness wrought by Hitler in Nazi Germany. It is an unfortunate fact that such turmoil gives rise to some of the best art in the years after the strife. Norman Page, in his brilliantly researched and written AUDEN AND ISHERWOOD: THE BERLIN YEARS, has selected two men of great significance in literature and poetry as his points of entry into studying the Berlin that seduced the world before it jolted nearly to an end. These portraits of Auden and Isherwood are really an examination of an historical time that altered the art world as inevitably as it altered our sense of the dangers of dictaorship.
Initally drawn to Berlin from the hallowed halls of English academe because of the rowdy free sex/hedonisitc atmosphere that had become Berlin, "Berlin meant Boys" and both our artists fled the England that sacrificed Oscar Wilde to find the open sexual freedom of the City of Sodom. Author Page gives us such a rich, fascinating ride through the places and faces of pre-war Berlin that we are finally allowed to see why Modernism started, why cinema became important, how artists such as Grosz and Dix and composers such as Weill and Stravinsky, scientists (Hirschfeld) and writers (Brecht) found such acrid colors for their creativity. Page is not confined to his title characters, though we learn more personal characteristics than any writer has dared to date: we are informed about Marlene Dietrich, Stephen Spender, Benjamin Britten, as well as a constellation of other characters encountered by them. This volume reads like a novel (not without some kinship to Isherwood's famed GOODBYE TO BERLIN), but its importance as a publication is its uncommonly thorough view of why Hitler rose, why the Berlin Wall was destined to be (and to fall), and why the center of the artistic universe was for a few short years the glossy, naughty Berlin.
This book is a must for those who want to understand the beginnings of sexual freedom, those fascinated by the inception of WW II, and for those who happen to love the poetry of W.H. Auden and the stories of Christopher Isherwood. Keep this book on your literary Reference Shelf.
Mistitled
23 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I essentially agree with the Publisher's Weekly review of this volume, but feel that perhaps the reading public would be better served if the book were called *Berlin: The Auden and Isherwood Years.* It is a portrait of the city found in Isherwood's writings, not a biographical work or portrait of the authors.
The bulk of the book involves a painstaking painting of Berlin, as obsessively detailed as a Civil War reenactor's map-poring. The chapter titles convey the author's approach: Berlin Faces (biographical sketches of sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, archeologist and bon vivant Francis Turville-Petre, anthropologist John Layard, critic Gerald Hamilton and others); Berlin Places (which compulsively recreates the architecture of Weimar era streets and buildings); Weimar Cinema (film in Berlin); Writing (where Page examines the works of the titular authors). It can be seen that there is little biographical coverage of Auden and Isherwood here.
These four chapters are prefaced by a strange, conflicted review of Auden's and Isherwood's sex lives in the city. This would be the most biographical material in the volume, except that Page can't decide what attitude to take as author. He wants to poo-poo the conservatives who disapprove of either discussions of the men's homosexuality or the sexual orientation itself. Yet Page writes with judgmental though entranced language recalling Maggie Smith's best stiff-upper-lip line readings (copulatory pinewoods, soldiers' trousers stretched tight over chubby buttocks, exploration of low-life, irresponsibility, prudence, lurid etc). He comes off as neither credible academic nor gay history buff but rather pained outsider.
It's interesting that the Acknowledgements don't contain a nod to an editor. Editing could have helped. In a 3-page epilogue Page introduces the premise that should have informed every preceding chapter (how the Berlin experiences reflected crucial aspects of both mens' personal and professional lives). Editing would have revised the personal conflicts revealed in Page's pursed-lip language. Editing could have broken up some of the 50-, 60- and 70- word sentences to avoid benumbed reader concentration. All in all, a work for researchers rather than lay readers.
The bulk of the book involves a painstaking painting of Berlin, as obsessively detailed as a Civil War reenactor's map-poring. The chapter titles convey the author's approach: Berlin Faces (biographical sketches of sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld, archeologist and bon vivant Francis Turville-Petre, anthropologist John Layard, critic Gerald Hamilton and others); Berlin Places (which compulsively recreates the architecture of Weimar era streets and buildings); Weimar Cinema (film in Berlin); Writing (where Page examines the works of the titular authors). It can be seen that there is little biographical coverage of Auden and Isherwood here.
These four chapters are prefaced by a strange, conflicted review of Auden's and Isherwood's sex lives in the city. This would be the most biographical material in the volume, except that Page can't decide what attitude to take as author. He wants to poo-poo the conservatives who disapprove of either discussions of the men's homosexuality or the sexual orientation itself. Yet Page writes with judgmental though entranced language recalling Maggie Smith's best stiff-upper-lip line readings (copulatory pinewoods, soldiers' trousers stretched tight over chubby buttocks, exploration of low-life, irresponsibility, prudence, lurid etc). He comes off as neither credible academic nor gay history buff but rather pained outsider.
It's interesting that the Acknowledgements don't contain a nod to an editor. Editing could have helped. In a 3-page epilogue Page introduces the premise that should have informed every preceding chapter (how the Berlin experiences reflected crucial aspects of both mens' personal and professional lives). Editing would have revised the personal conflicts revealed in Page's pursed-lip language. Editing could have broken up some of the 50-, 60- and 70- word sentences to avoid benumbed reader concentration. All in all, a work for researchers rather than lay readers.
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