Christopher Isherwood · 1939 · overland

Christopher Isherwood's 1939 collection of linked Berlin sketches from the dying days of the Weimar Republic, later the seed of the musical Cabaret. The narrator, a young English writer, drifts among nightclub singers, landladies, hard-up families and a doomed Jewish department-store dynasty as Nazism rises around them. More a portrait of a city on the edge than a journey, its one true excursion a summer on Ruegen, it is one of the great records of a world about to end.

1. 1
   Berlin

   From a room on Nollendorfstrasse the young Englishman watches Weimar Berlin in its last giddy season, Sally Bowles and the cabarets, recording it all like a camera with its shutter open.

2. 2
   Ruegen Island

   A summer on the Baltic island of Ruegen, swimming and idling, while across the water the politics that will swallow everything gathers force.

3. 3
   Berlin

   Back to a colder, hungrier city, the Nowaks' tenement and the doomed Landauers, as the Nazis take the streets and it becomes time, at last, to say goodbye to Berlin.