Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years. Norman Page

Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years



Download Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years



Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years Norman Page ebook pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Language: English
Page: 220
ISBN: 0333720229, 9780333720226

Amazon.com Review

For late-20th-century culture, Berlin in the 1930s has become a place of mythic enchantment and decadence, a hypersexual Eden fraught with the danger of oncoming fascism. But this late-century fantasy of the Weimar Republic has always obscured the material reality of the actual time and place. Norman Page's Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years is a succinct, extraordinarily well researched, and perceptive look at a very complicated cultural and political point in history. While Page organizes his book as a joint biography of novelist Christopher Isherwood (whose were the basis for ) and poet W.H. Auden--two politically progressive Englishmen who fled to Berlin to pursue the personal freedom they could not find at home--the book is actually a portrait of frantic Berlin culture from 1928 to 1933. While Auden and Isherwood were drawn to the city because of its open gay social life, Page makes it clear that the conditions allowing that freedom also created a vibrant, exhilarating artistic culture. From Josef von Sternberg's to Magnus Hirschfeld's fight for sexual liberation, Page places Isherwood and Auden (and their work) in a clear and beautifully textured historical context. Using Isherwood's and Auden's unpublished diaries, Page brings new insights to both these writers and an era that had a profound formative effect on their lives and work. --Michael Bronski
--This text refers to an alternate

edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Although the revival of Cabaret makes Page's study timely, the opportunity is mishandled. His visit to the Berlin years of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood reads like a series of rambling academic lectures. Source notes clot the narrative, pronoun references are often vague, and the detailed survey of 1928-1933 urban topography further erodes the narrative. Friends and, briefly, lovers, the two writers escaped to Weimar Berlin to sample its gay clubs and rent boys. Auden, who would visit during holidays, found much inspiration but little of literary value in the sexual turn-ons of the scene. Isherwood would casually mask his experience in the novellas collected as The Berlin Stories (1935-1939), which Page (A.E. Housman) calls "too discreet, too evasive, too readily disposed to encode and displace, to make use of what must have been wonderfully colourful material." That Isherwood's stories were autobiographical fiction rather than autobiography and were written for a more censorious generation, yet inspired the play I Am a Camera and the musical Cabaret, seems less significant to Page than their less-than-complete exposure of the depression-driven daydream that Berlin seemed to be before the rise of Hitler. From Isherwood's 1977 memoir, Christopher and His Kind, Page quotes the author's rueful confession, "Seldom have wild oats been sown more prudently." This book reflects that disappointment. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate

edition.



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