Lisa Lieberman's Blog - Posts Tagged "christopher-isherwood"
Welcome to Weimar
Isherwood didn't think much of the stage or film version of Cabaret, but then, he was hard on his younger self for having created "a sanitized picture" of the Weimar era. At the end of his life, he was brave enough to look back and see what he'd missed as a young man in Berlin, and honest enough to acknowledge his blindness and self-absorption. "Berlin was a place of great hardship and suffering but you don't see much of that [in The Berlin Stories]," he said in Christopher and His Kind.
The prostitutes who walked the streets, the blond working-class boys who were the objects of Wystan's and Christopher's lust, were driven less by pleasure than poverty, I suspect. Focusing on the decadence of Berlin's café culture, whether to celebrate or condemn the sexual hedonism that drew foreigners to the city, obscures the harsh reality of the time, the extreme deprivation felt by millions of Germany's citizens.
Read my latest column on 3 Quarks Daily.
The prostitutes who walked the streets, the blond working-class boys who were the objects of Wystan's and Christopher's lust, were driven less by pleasure than poverty, I suspect. Focusing on the decadence of Berlin's café culture, whether to celebrate or condemn the sexual hedonism that drew foreigners to the city, obscures the harsh reality of the time, the extreme deprivation felt by millions of Germany's citizens.
Read my latest column on 3 Quarks Daily.
