"Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Triptych" by Jackie Hedeman
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
—W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939"
I’ve been thinking about passivity. I like to look before I leap, sometimes looking so long and so hard that I wind up frozen on the edge of the metaphorical diving board, unwilling either to jump or to turn around and descend the stairs. There’s a reason I have found myself drawn to Christopher Isherwood’s famously over-quoted opening to his 1939 novella Goodbye to Berlin:
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
Recently, an online publication that published one of my earliest and then most vulnerable essays, shuttered. The news led me to revisit the essay, and while I still loved it, I could see the places where an incomplete understanding of who I was impacted the essay’s potential power and lowered its stakes. The essay was still good, but over time it had become something like a lie. Or if not a lie, a sin of omission.
I’ve been thinking about what it means to write my life when my conception of self is built on shifting sand. Isherwood, who arrived in Berlin from England in 1929 and remained until the mid-1930s, attempted this over decades. He intended to mine his time in Berlin for an epic novel, The Lost, but it never materialized. Instead, the material for it spawned three books, all less-than-fictional: first The Berlin Stories (1945) where Goodbye to Berlin appears, then in his fiction/nonfiction hybrid, Down There on a Visit (1962), and finally in his memoir Christopher and His Kind (1976).
Isherwood’s prose blends genre and crosses time to revisit key moments in his development as a writer, a gay man, and a global citizen in Berlin. The move Isherwood makes from fiction to memoir over the course of these books is a move out of the closet, but it is also a prolonged grappling with his complicity as a writer and as a British citizen amid the rise of Nazism. Isherwood’s work is time and place-bound, but no less relevant for it. His observations, and his attempts to justify and understand himself, echo chillingly in my own ears and era.
Though it was published in 1945, The Berlin Stories consists of Goodbye to Berlin, the source of this essay’s epigraph, published in 1939, and The Last of Mr. Norris, a 1935 novella. These works formed the source material for the John Van Druten play I Am A Camera, which in turn was adapted into the musical Cabaret by Kander & Ebb. These days, perhaps, The Berlin Stories would be considered autofiction and hotly debated on Book Twitter. In these, Isherwood mostly experiences the rise of Nazism as a personal inconvenience and avoids explicit commentary. What little foreshadowing occurs in The Berlin Stories occurs as bitterly ironic reporting: “You ask the people around here, Herr Christoph,” one landlady explains. “They’d never turn out the Jews.”
While Isherwood’s second Berlin book, the hybrid Down There on a Visit, bears a similar relationship to fact, it is more overtly and playfully coy with its self-awareness. The book consists of four sections—linked short stories—following the movements of four first-person protagonists, all named Christopher Isherwood. Perhaps these Christopher Isherwoods are all the same Christopher Isherwood, and perhaps this Christopher Isherwood is the same Christopher Isherwood as the book’s author. The Isherwood of Down There on a Visit is both young and old, unknowing and knowing, a constructed persona and writer at the desk:
The Christopher who sat in that taxi is, practically speaking, dead; he only remains reflected in the fading memories of us who knew him. I can’t revitalize him now. I can only reconstruct him from his remembered acts and words and from the writings he has left us. He embarrasses me often, and so I’m tempted to sneer at him; but I will try not to. I’ll try not to apologize for him, either. After all, I owe him some respect. In a sense he is my father, and in another sense my son.
From this opening, Down There on a Visit proceeds to cover familiar ground in the form of highly narrative, first-person prose, very much in the style of The Berlin Stories. However, unlike The Berlin Stories, Down There on a Visit benefits from hindsight, and Isherwood makes the shift from observation to implication:
But now the Nazis are in power. And now I have to admit to myself that I have never been seriously involved, never been a real partisan; only an excited spectator. When I first came to Berlin, I came quite irresponsibly, for a thrill. […] But have I really changed underneath? Aren’t I as irresponsible as ever, running away from the situation like this? Isn’t it somehow a betrayal?
Isherwood lunges toward accountability, and then retreats, and his character’s eventual departure from Germany is a departure from this kind of soul-searching. Perhaps leaving this personal inventory incomplete, at least in print, is some part of what impelled the publication of the memoir Christopher and His Kind.
Isherwood constructs the entirety of Christopher and His Kind as self-annotation. Presenting the actions of “Christopher” and commenting on these actions as “I,” Isherwood revisits every event chronicled in the previous books and peels back fiction and stylistic façades to explain what really happened, affording him a unique opportunity to address his past oversights directly. In Christopher and His Kind, form matches content: a rocky, non-narrative read, disruptive of our received sense of memoir in general and Isherwood’s work in particular. Truth, revelation, and reliability are Isherwood’s goals. The form of the memoir with its verbatim excerpts and explanations supports his apparent logos. On his negligible political engagement in early thirties Berlin, Isherwood writes:
Christopher, like other optimistic ill-wishers, kept repeating that [Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor] was a blessing in disguise; Hitler would now have to cope with the economic mess, he would reveal himself as an incompetent windbag, he would be forced to resign, and the Nazis would be forever discredited.
I don’t blame Christopher the amateur observer for his lack of foresight. I do condemn Christopher the novelist for not having taken a psychological interest, long before this, in the members of the Nazi high command.
Goodbye to Berlin’s “I am a camera” conceit operated as a convenient distancing tactic, allowing Isherwood to exist on the page without giving too much of himself away. Differentiating between “Christopher the amateur observer” and “Christopher the novelist,” Isherwood critiques that tactic directly. This final Christopher, the one writing a memoir, is all too aware of the distance between thought and action, between reportage and participation.
These three works stand alone—were marketed alone and conceived alone—yet Christopher and His Kind revises Down There on a Visit, which revises The Berlin Stories. As I attempt to understand what it means to move from passive observer to active participant in the staging of my own life—coming to understand and take ownership of my role in what happens to and around me—I find it useful to think of the three works as a triptych.
In art historical terms, a triptych is an image in three parts. The Oxford Art Encyclopedia clarifies, “a triptych usually consists of a central panel flanked by wings (or shutters), which may be hinged; as a compositional form it is a tripartite structure, often with an emphasized central element.” This central element is literal (a central, often larger, panel), but also figurative (the element as linking theme for the triptych as a whole).
If I conceive of Isherwood’s Berlin saga as a triptych, his central element can only be The Berlin Stories. It is the reason for the season. It situates Isherwood’s preoccupations in a time and place. It is both foundation and launch pad. As a character observes toward the end of that book, “I believe that you will always come back to Berlin, Christopher. You seem to belong here.”
While a trilogy unfolds along a timeline, a triptych unhinges and opens in three dimensions, and may be read in several orders or directions. Isherwood’s Berlin books are easily read through the lens of each other. Read in one direction, they teach us about fictional construction: the choices an author makes when mining his own life for inspiration. Read another way, these books unfold in the direction of truth: stripping back artifice to reveal the true concerns central to memoir, the self, and how that self is at odds or in sync with the world.
Before Hieronymus Bosch, who produced some of the world’s most well-known medieval triptychs, a triptych’s images were united by theme, and that theme was almost always religious. Even after Bosch, the triptych was primarily a multifaceted, meditative reflection on a single religious theme. Isherwood himself was not religious, though he embraced, first, pacifism and then in later life Vedanta philosophy, both of which put a premium on personal moral accounting. Within the context of a Berlin Triptych, rewriting, revising, and clarifying does begin to resemble a path to atonement.
Triptychs are journey and destination in one. The word triptych—and, again, I turn to Oxford Art—denotes “both the object itself and its compositional form.” The triptych is consumed (acted upon) but it also acts upon. A closed triptych presents one image. Opened, it presents another. These images cannot be considered simultaneously and so they play on memory. The exterior of the triptych, imperfectly remembered, informs the viewer’s reception of the three opened panels. The triptych is an interactive, performative visual art form, which maps all the more readily onto Isherwood’s Berlin works given their historical context. Just as the three books (the interior panels) build meaning alongside each other, so too do these books gain another dimension when considered as part of their historical moment (the exterior image). As a reader, I approach Isherwood’s work with my own knowledge and preconceptions of World War II and the years leading up to it. Once consumed, his work either reinforces or challenges those views. The imperfection of memory and perception powers the triptych, both in Isherwood’s writing and my consumption. Reading, I meditate on, and with, the triptych in an attempt to reach some kind of actionable truth.
The triptych is a cautionary form. Religious art has always been half adoration, half morality tale, and Isherwood clearly adored Berlin and was profoundly shaped by what he experienced there. It is appropriate, then, that while what Christopher and His Kind offers the Second World War may be too little too late, Isherwood’s observations and failures will strike modern readers, in particular those who share Isherwood’s privilege, as uncomfortably resonant. I read the Berlin Triptych and I am privy to Isherwood’s oversights. I read his annotations and explanations and begin to get a sense of what mistakes he believes must be rectified. He falls short, still. He fails to grapple entirely with his misogyny, his own racism, and anti-Semitism.
Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Triptych holds an uncomfortable mirror up to my own life, forcing myself to consider the ways I may be, or am, passively propping up white supremacy or nationalism. But that is not the only place I recognize myself at the unfolding of this triptych. In his rewriting, I see a kind of aspirational striving, a honing path I can perhaps allow myself to follow. There is an urge when writing, at least for me, to never return to exactly the same material. This urge is in direct opposition to what I know about writers and how they work. Everyone, as my favorite grad school professor, playwright, and theatre-maker Jennifer Schlueter says, has their “stuff.” Perhaps what I am resisting is not a return to the same story but a return to the same approach to the same story.
As if it’s even possible to do this, Isherwood suggests, with so much time and understanding in the rearview mirror. A triptych rejects unidirectional thinking, acknowledging that the present influences our view of the past just as strongly as the past sets the stage for the present. In the midst of all this oscillation, how could I ever hope to offer the last word on myself? How could anyone?
Jackie Hedeman (she/her) received her MFA from The Ohio State University and her BA from Princeton University. Her writing has appeared in Autostraddle, The Best American Travel Writing 2017, Electric Literature, Fugue, The Offing, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat Fellow and a Charlotte Street Foundation 2019-2021 Studio Resident. With Molly Olguín, she is the co-creator of The Pasithea Powder, a scripted audio drama.
