Goodbye to Berlin

Schöneberg in the early 1930s: the boarding houses smell of cabbage, the cabarets blaze until dawn, and the brownshirts are multiplying. Isherwood rented a room at Nollendorfstraße 17 and turned what he saw into a series of portraits — Sally Bowles vamping between auditions, a Jewish department-store family sensing the ground shift beneath them, a landlady navigating respectability and survival. The Nazis are always offstage, getting closer. Berlin here is not backdrop but barometer: every party, every hushed conversation, measures the pressure drop before the storm that will flatten the city.