It’s always with a hint of melancholy that I temper the exhilaration of that first mind-blowing encounter with a great work of art. It’s a feeling I know I’ll never experience again.
You only get one chance to meet Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in “The Apartment.” Or scale, then survive Everest with Jon Krakauer in “Into Thin Air.” Or feel your jaw drop at the opening chords to “Holidays in the Sun” to begin your life-changing journey through the Sex Pistols’ seminal “Never Mind the Bollocks.”
It makes me want to engage some sort of selective amnesia so I might enjoy them all as a newbie again. I get intensely jealous watching someone watch “Star Wars: A New Hope” for the first time. What heightened experiences, long familiar to me, await them as they travel the strange new worlds unfolding on the screen. (Disclaimer: “Star Wars” is not necessarily a slam dunk on Gen-Zers like my niece who, accustomed to the CGI-riddled Marvel Universe, regarded the epic clash of rebels and empire with a puzzled shrug).
Second watches/reads/listens are rarely as good. I’ve tried. I once reread “The Age of Innocence,” ready to fall in love with Edith Wharton’s tale of star-crossed love all over again, but it didn’t measure up to the emotional charge of that first read. Rewatches of “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai” have been equally disappointing. (Disclaimer 2: There are films — “A Separation” and “Three Days of the Condor” come to mind — that oddly landed better the second time around because, I believe, once was not enough for me to properly understand them. That’s for another blog post.)
A silver lining of this quandary? There are endless gems out there, whether on the page, screen or stereo, waiting to be discovered. A few weeks ago, scanning the shelves of the library, I spotted Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories.” I’m embarrassed to say neither Isherwood nor this book were familiar to me, although the musical “Cabaret,” developed from one of its memorable characters, rang a bell. In any case, after skimming the inner sleeve to get the gist of it, I checked it out. It was a delightful read, particularly the “Goodbye Berlin” section that unfolds as a meandering collection of vignettes of early-1930s Berlin life organized around the oddball characters that form the heart of the novel.
In this particular edition, the introduction by Armistead Maupin made much of Isherwood’s homosexuality and his reluctance to insert that dimension of himself into the narrative. It makes sense, given the stricter social mores of that era and the potential repercussions he or the book could’ve faced. Still, I read Maupin’s essay as a back-handed critique of the work, a failing, at least from a gay-rights perspective. It’s a fair point. But I’d argue that out of Isherwood’s sense of discretion comes an unintended benefit, one that offers an effectively dispassionate, journalistic exploration of a fascinating period in 20th century history.
What must it have been like in the last years of the failing Weimar Republic as Nazis and communists tangled on the streets of Berlin like rival gangs for the right to lead Germany into a bloody future? How did Adolf Hitler, in a matter of 3 years, ascend from ranting leader of an undisciplined and politically unpopular fringe movement to Führer of the Reich? Isherwood’s account, told mostly through the words and deeds of disparate thugs, players and other outcasts hanging around Berlin’s beer halls and coffee houses, along with the bourgeois pupils seeking his services as an English tutor, gives us some clues. He does this precisely because he maintains a personal distance from the story, other than what is necessary to observe and report his observations. As he notes, “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” While he loves Berlin and obviously lived more than he lets on as an active participant in the stories he tells, it’s his status as an Englishman, a foreigner, an embedded yet detached guest, that uniquely qualifies him to document those crucial years in Germany.
What he reports is a culturally vibrant but socially fragile society that seems hellbent on descending into the madness of a fascist state. It’s like watching the proverbial car crash in slow motion. And it’s at that point that Isherwood safely makes his exit, knowing full well the cast of characters that enriched his narrative, gave it such life, wouldn’t have the same luxury. It’s on the last pages that he acknowledges that heartbreaking reality, leaving the ragged collection of characters he’s drawn so vividly to their fate:
To-morrow I am going to England. In a few weeks I shall return, but only to pick up my things, before leaving Berlin altogether.
Poor Frl. Schroeder is inconsolable: ‘I shall never find another gentleman like you, Herr Issyvoo — always so punctual with the rent…. I’m sure I don’t know what makes you want to leave Berlin, all of a sudden, like this….’
It’s no use trying to explain to her, or talking politics. Already she is adapting herself, as she will adapt herself to every new regime. This morning I even heard her talking reverently about ‘Der Führer’ to the porter’s wife. If anybody were to remind her that, at the elections last November, she voted communist, she would probably deny it hotly, and in perfect good faith. She is merely acclimatizing herself, in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter. Thousands of people like Frl. Schroeder are acclimatizing themselves. After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.
In any truly enjoyable book, there’s the point where I become alarmed by the thinning stack of pages left to read. I slow down, trying to savor each paragraph, in a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable — the last page, and the closing of the cover. This was painfully the case with “Berlin Stories,” because while I’ll now recommend it to friends (and envy the ones who take me up on it), I know it’s over for me. Perhaps I’ll buy my own copy, maybe even read it again someday, but the experience won’t be the same. All I can do is smile and hope to stumble across that next novel slice of strange magic waiting to be discovered.
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