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Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years

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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.

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.