By Maria Messias Mendes
The 1930s, which culminated in another World War, was a dramatic decade. The nature of the Second World War turned out to be even more impersonal than the First. Further, this war spread across the entire globe with even more devastating technologies and civilians becoming a legitimate target of conflict. This decade was characterised by a curious composition of real political instability, major world events and at the same time life going on as normal outside political events. The literature surrounding World War II reflects the anxiety of life under such extreme circumstances. This is also the case for Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye To Berlin (1939) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of The Day (1948.) Isherwood’s novel auto-fictively narrates the time he spent in pre-Nazi Berlin and the people he met. Bowen’s novel explores Stella Rodney’s relationship with her lover Robert Kelway in London during the Blitz. Stella’s life begins to break apart, as the intelligence agent Harrison accuses Robert of being a spy for the enemy. Both novels use the deterioration of cities to underline the deterioration of a no longer existent society and expand this to a moral instability and ambivalence. By comparing the two novels we will explore how they trace the changes brought by the war, showing that their starting point was prior to the outbreak.
In the 1920s Weimar culture was known for its decadence and Berlin was its centre: ‘Berlin was a magnet[,] the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented.’[1] Yet, the next decade brought with it a ‘profound malaise’ of economic and political crises.[2] Thus, Berlin began to lose its splendour and Isherwood underlines this through his presentation of it as a city of appearances: the way things appear on the surface may not be how they really are. We can see this straight away in the opening paragraph of ‘A Berlin Diary: Autumn 1930:’
Cellar shops […] under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. [Streets] like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class.[3]
The revealing aspect of the description of ‘the deep solemn massive streets’ of Berlin are the adjectives, which are linked to decay: ‘solemn,’ ‘dirty,’ ‘shabby,’ ‘tarnished’ and ‘second-hand.’ They contrast the grandness of the buildings themselves that are ‘embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices,’ filled with ‘valuables.’ We still see what once made Berlin ‘irresistible,’ but the buildings Isherwood is detailing are a ‘shadow’ of what they were just a decade earlier.[4] The alertness of Isherwood’s novel to decay and sickness becomes the metaphor for the final days of Weimar culture as it deteriorates.
The ideal is also ruptured in the pastoral interlude on Ruegen Island, as ‘the bathing-beach by the pier’ is cut through by fascistic signs: ‘there are the German cityflags […] as well as […] Nazi colours. Each […] sand bulwark [has] inscriptions in fir-cones: Waldesruh. Familie Walter. Stahlheim. Heil Hitler! Many of the forts are also decorated with the Nazi swastika.’[5] Having city and family names mixed with the ‘Nazi colours,’ ‘swastika[s]’ and salute underlines the encroaching shadow of Nazism, which has already crept into everyday life. This is further emphasised as Isherwood describes ‘a child […] marching along […] with a swastika flag over his shoulder and singing “Deutschland über alles.”’[6] Thus, Isherwood is showing the increasingly volatile climate of Berlin in the 1930s. He writes about it more directly in the following passage: ‘[a]bout a month after the Elections, […] [g]angs of Nazi roughs turned out to demonstrate against the Jews. They man-handled some […] pedestrians, and smashed the windows of all the Jewish shops.’[7] Since the event is brushed off as ‘not […] very remarkable’ and only memorable ‘because it was [the narrator’s] first introduction to Berlin politics highlights what Hynes reads as ‘[dispassionate and] cold passivity.’[8] He is recounting these political events in the light of the exit opportunity available to him as a visitor. Nevertheless, the passage underlines the political instability of Weimar with its many elections, as well as the increasing violence of Nazi paramilitary groups. This escalated even further in the following years, when ‘[h]ardly a day passed without one or two being killed in Berlin [by] S.A. men.’[9] This explains why, in the final diary entry, the narrator leaves Berlin in ‘horrified’ disillusionment.[10] He now sees it as ‘city with two centres:’ not the ‘pompous’ buildings, but ‘a small damp black wood [is the real heart of Berlin.]’[11] Berlin’s ‘warmth is an illusion.’[12] Thus, even for the narrator, the image of Berlin as the centre of decadent Weimar Cabaret Culture has been recognised as nothing but a fantasy: ‘[he] can’t altogether believe that any of [it] really happened….’[13] This explains why we go from autumn in the first ‘Berlin Diary’ to winter in the last: the culture that was living its final days is now dead, ‘a skeleton which aches in the cold.’[14] As Piazza puts it: ‘Berlin is lost.’[15]
Bowen is famous for evoking the period of the Blitz. Rawlinson explains what living under the constant threat of bombings meant: “[T]he unnerving dissolution of boundaries […] are revealed in what has become a newly liminal place: the capital city at war is both rear area and battlefield, as far from and as near to war as you can get.’[16] Paradoxically, London was not a theatre of war, but still experienced the forefronts of war by being bombed and destroyed. In this vein, Bowen shows the enclosed febrile environment of London during the Blitz as a liminal space, or as Teekell argues as ‘a no-place.’[17] One aspect of this is her use of binaries, most frequently the contrast of living and dead — the ‘wrecked buildings [standing for] ineluctable proximity of the dead’ as Rawlinson puts it:[18]
These unknown dead reproached those left living […]. [A]mong the crowds still [living] there began to be an instinctive movement to break down indifference […]. The wall between the living and the dead thinned. […] [E]ach hoped not to die that night[.][19]
Bowen is using the idea of the horrible sense of imminence that war brings, a ‘thinning between living and dead.’ She blurs the lines between the two. The subject of the sentences changes from ‘unknown dead’ to ‘the [living] crowds’ or ‘strangers.’ Additionally, each is juxtaposed with its opposite: ‘dead reproached [the] living,’ ‘the dead and the living’ and the living ‘strangers [hoping] not to die.’ The living could at any point become the dead: ‘death […] might any night be shared;’ the dead are equally linked to the living: they are ‘not […] today's dead but […] yesterday’s living.’[20] This is the atmosphere of the blitzed London. Yet, Bowen highlights the temporary nature of this specific state: ‘[t]hat particular conjunction of life and death [and] particular psychic London was to be gone for ever; more bombs would fall, but not on the same city. War moved from the horizon to the map.’[21] Bowen also uses the idea of people becoming accustomed to this strange liminal state of London: ‘it was now, when you no longer saw, smelled war, that a deadening acclimatization to it began to set in.’[22] It suggests that one can become acclimatised to anything. Moreover, the combination ‘deadening acclimatization’ implies that this is what destroys human connection, turning the living into ‘strangers.’
Goodbye to Berlin and The Heat of the Day show the deterioration of a city, whether through political and economic crises or war. This decay is also applicable to the characters and their moralities in both texts. In Goodbye to Berlin, we see the doubling of reality and appearance of the buildings in the characters of the novel, for example, Sally. This already becomes clear in our first introduction to her: while she is sexually promiscuous and looks ‘about twenty-five,’ ‘her fingernails are painted emerald green [which] are as dirty as a little girl’s.’[23] Yet, she is nineteen.[24] She seems both older and younger than she is. This instability of appearance versus reality also extends to moral instability. We can already see this in the opening passage; ‘bankrupt middle class’ implies ‘a bankruptcy of values.’[25] For example when there is no comment on Frl. Mayer’s anti-Semitic feelings of not wanting ‘filthy Jews to touch [Sally.]’[26] In general, immoral characters are presented as sympathetic and appealing, as in the last reference to Christopher’s landlady Frl. Schroeder:
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. […] I heard her talking reverently about ‘Der Führer’ […]. Thousands of people like Frl. Shroeder are acclimatizing themselves.[27]
Similarly to Bowen, Isherwood observes how people can acclimatise themselves to anything and presents this as natural: ‘in accordance with a natural law, like an animal which changes its coat for the winter.’[28] The reason why is that ‘whatever government is in power, [people] are doomed to live in this town.’[29] The portrayal is commiserative: ‘She is merely acclimatizing herself.’ It is a sympathetic understanding of how a whole county might sleepwalk into a disaster, as Germany did in the 1930s.
In The Heat of the Day, the liminal space of blitzed London can be extended to the instability of morals. In contrast to the First World War, the Second was represented as a war of purpose: to take on fascism and Naziism in Europe. While Bowen acknowledges this, she also nuances and complicates it. Bowen mockingly differentiates the First and the Second world wars: ‘They were lucky to die before the illusion had broken down – this is not a troubadour’s war, Stella. They took what they had with them: they were the finish.’[30] Far from a confident sense of moral justness of war, we have a sense of harrows of the First World War overshadowing something of moral confusion in London. Thus, Bowen’s novel casts a different light on the war to the governing mythos of a moral consensus: ‘“War. If you come to think of it, hasn’t started anything that wasn’t there already–what it does is, put the other lot of us in the right.”’[31] Instead of there being a new type of criminality, Bowen suggests that there is just more of the same criminality. Thus, she is alluding to some of the ambiguities and moral ambivalence that war permits. It is ‘a Crooks’ war,’ in which both Harrison and Robert engage.[32] They are doubles of one another, something already indicated by them sharing the same first name. Moreover, when Stella finds out about Richard’s betrayal, ‘it seemed to her it was Robert who had been the Harrison.’[33] Harrison had been the one telling the truth about Robert’s alliances. North explains what this means for Stella:
‘[Robert] presents […] the collapse of the wall between good and evil, since he is clearly wrong though personally so appealing, while his ghostly double, the offensive Harrison, is clearly on the right side, while also being deeply dubious personality.’[34]
Indeed, Harrison ‘uses [the story of Robert treachery] to blackmail her into having an affair with him.’[35] These binaries and doublings underline how, in this war atmosphere, ‘people […] began, even, to look a little alike.’[36] Naturally, this has an effect on morals as well: Stella points out to Robert that ‘in one particular issue which might be found, anybody is capable of anything.’[37] Thinking about Robert’s morals, especially in the light of his treason, we might begin to wonder whether war permits morality. This is only possible because ‘below one level, everybody’s horribly alike.’[38] As Corcoran points out, ‘a vertiginously undermining aspect […] is indeed the extent to which, under certain circumstances, anyone is capable of anything including political and sexual betrayal.’[39] This means that, as Teekell argues, the ‘“violent destruction of solid things” also becomes the destruction of intangible values.’[40]
Both Isherwood and Bowen underline the destructive force of war. Isherwood demonstrates the deterioration of Weimar culture and how its decline correlates to the rise of Nazism. Bowen creates the atmosphere of blitzed London as a destroyed city and as a liminal space of binaries, especially between life and death. Both authors link this decline to morality. Isherwood offers a sympathetic explanation as to how the Nazis could have gained power, starting one of the most devastating events in history. Bowen builds on this deterioration of morals as she gives insight into a different way of envisioning the moral terrain of the Blitz than offered by the governing mythos. She shows how war creates an environment in which immorality can thrive. In other words, together these novels show how moral ambivalence is built up long before the War actually breaks out.
Footnotes
[1] Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 128.
[2] Gay, Weimar Culture, p. 140.
[3] Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 9.
[4] Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, p. 128.
[5] Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, p. 110.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid., p. 175.
[8] Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's (Michigan: The Bodley Head, 1976), p. 357.
[9] Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography: 1932-40 (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 29.
[10] Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, p. 255.
[11] Ibid., pp. 230-231.
[12] Ibid. p. 231.
[13] Ibid., p.256.
[14] Ibid., p. 230.
[15] Paul Piazza, Christopher Isherwood: Myth and Anti-myth (New York, 1978), p. 100.
[16] Mark Rawlinson, ‘The Second World War: British Writing,’ in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (Cambridge: CUP, 2009), 197-211 (p. 202).
[17] Anna Teekell, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Language at War,’ New Hibernia Review, 15 (2011), 61-79 (p. 78).
[18] Rawlinson, ‘The Second World War: British Writing,’ p. 202.
[19] Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 92.
[20] Ibid., pp. 92’91.
[21] Ibid., p. 92.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, pp. 41’34.
[24] Ibid, p. 41.
[25] Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's, p. 356.
[26] Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, p. 71.
[27] Ibid., pp. 254-255.
[28] Ibid., p. 254.
[29] Ibid., p. 255.
[30] Bowen, The Heat of the Day, p. 276.
[31] Ibid., p. 33.
[32] Ibid., pp. 34.
[33] Ibid., p. 275.
[34] Michael North, ‘World War II: the city in ruins’ in The Cambridge History of Twentieth- Century English Literature, ed. Marcus Laura and Peter Nichols, (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 436-452 (p. 452).
[35] Neil Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: OUP, 2003), p. 169.
[36] Bowen, The Heat of the Day, p. 94.
[37] Ibid., p. 190.
[38] Ibid., p. 138.
[39] Corcoran, The Enforced Return, p. 182.
[40] Teekell, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Language at War,’ p. 74.
Bibliography
Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day (London: Vintage, 1998)
Corcoran, Neil, Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return (Oxford: OUP, 2003)
Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Harper & Row, 1968)
Hynes, Samuel, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930's (Michigan: The Bodley Head, 1976)
Isherwood, Christopher, Goodbye to Berlin (London: Vintage, 1998)
Koestler, Arthur, The Invisible Writing: The Second Volume of an Autobiography: 1932-40 (London: Vintage, 2005)
North, Michael, ‘World War II: the city in ruins,’ in The Cambridge History of Twentieth- Century English Literature, ed. Marcus Laura and Peter Nichols, (Cambridge: CUP, 2005)
Piazza, Paul, Christopher Isherwood: Myth and Anti-myth (New York, 1978)
Rawlinson, Mark, ‘The Second World War: British Writing,’ in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (CUP: Cambridge, 2009)
Teekell, Anna, ‘Elizabeth Bowen and Language at War,’ New Hibernia Review, 15 (2011)
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