First published in 1934, Goodbye to Berlin has been popularized on stage and screen by Julie Harris in I Am a Camera and Liza Minelli in Cabaret. Isherwood magnificently captures 1931 Berlin: charming with its avenues and cafés; marvelously grotesque with its nightlife and dreamers; dangerous with its vice and intrigue; powerful and seedy with its mobs and millionaires. The shadow of Hitler looms menacingly, towering higher and higher. Goodbye to Berlin is inhabited by a wealth of characters: the unforgettable and “divinely decadent” Sally Bowles; plump Fraülein Schroeder, who considers reducing her Büste to relieve heart palpitations; Peter and Otto, a gay couple struggling with their relationship; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family the Landauers.

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), perhaps the first major openly gay writer to be read extensively by a wider audience, was one of the most distinguished authors of the twentieth century. His literary friendships encompassed such writers as W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Somerset Maugham.