Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood Page B

about Otto. When you did this, tears of sympathy started into Gisa’s eyes. Of course, the actual nature of the relationship was never discussed, but surely Gisa understood and deeply sympathized.
    Since “Isherwood” in the novel is never emotionally involved with Otto or with anyone else, it would have been impossible for him to reveal such feelings to Natalia, and thereby give her a chance to show her own warmth and sympathy. Christopher himself was aware that he hadn’t given the Natalia character enough warmth. He tried to make up for this toward the end of the story, when Natalia appears transformed by being in love.
    In the same letter, Stephen reproached Christopher for his sneers at Natalia’s culture worship: “After all, the Nazi attitude towards concerts and culture and Jews is in some respects like yours.”
    It is true that Christopher was still, at that time, violently prejudiced against culture worship. This prejudice had been formed long before he came to Germany, while he was living in the world of the London studios, salons, and concert halls as secretary to the violinist André Mangeot (called Cheuret in Lions and Shadows ). There he had grown to hate the gushings of concert audiences and the holy atmosphere of concerts.
    But Christopher and the Nazis didn’t see eye to eye. The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent. The rest were condemned as alien and decadent and as representing the culture of the Jews. Christopher himself worshipped culture, but his was a very exclusive religion, to be shared only with fellow artists. No one, he said, should dare to praise a work of art unless he himself is a practicing artist. Christopher therefore condemned the vast majority of culture worshippers as being ignorant, presumptuous, and probably insincere—whether they were Jews or non-Jews was irrelevant.
    Christopher outgrew this prejudice as he continued to publish books and began to acquire enthusiastic readers. It is not in human nature to condemn your own worshippers, even when they aren’t fellow artists.
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    In Goodbye to Berlin, Natalia Landauer has a cousin, Bernhard Landauer. Bernhard helps to run the department store which is owned by Natalia’s father. The original of Bernhard Landauer was Wilfrid Israel. Wilfrid Israel and Gisa Soloweitschik weren’t related to each other. Their families had no business connections. Wilfrid did, however, help to run a department store founded by his own family. It was one of the biggest in Berlin.
    Wilfrid was tall, pale, dark-eyed, soft-spoken, precise in his speech, a smiler who seldom laughed. He looked young for his age. When Christopher met him in 1931, he was thirty-two years old.
    As Bernhard in the novel, his profile is described as “over-civilized, finely drawn, beaky”:
    He smiled and his face was masked with exhaustion: the thought crossed my mind that he was perhaps suffering from a fatal disease.
    Again and again, Bernhard is presented as being tired, apathetic. He is evidently quite able to meet the obligations of his important executive job, but he regards it with weary irony. He even confesses to “Isherwood” that the store itself seems unreal to him at times, perhaps part of an hallucination from which he is suffering. This may not be meant literally, but Bernhard certainly is expressing a sense of the meaninglessness of his business life and of himself as a businessman. And he goes much further. When “Isherwood” asks him if he thinks there will be a Nazi Putsch or a Communist revolution, he answers that the question seems to him “a little trivial.” He produces a letter from a fanatical anti-Semite,