A close reading reveals that Isherwood, in a specific social and political context, considered Jews alien to him and -in accordance with social identity theory predictions- he instinctually derogated them. The article discusses the references to Jews in the writer’s novels, memoirs and diaries within the frame of reference of Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory which holds that humans innately derogate those who are perceived as being opposed. This study aims to fill that void by dissecting the author’s bias against Jews: its origin and nature. In it, the shared textuality of the urban and the literary is developed along thematic lines that stem from a basic autobiographical matrix: the city as the elected location for the construction of a personal, sexual and ideological identity the structural identification between the narrating self (also an authorial projection) and the city as body and, finally, the city as illusion, artifice and cluster of isolated realities, in its turn related to a problematic caesura between individual and community.Ģ003 / 10 Prospero.There are numerous references to Christopher Isherwood’s prejudices against Jews in scholarly literature however, this subject has not yet been approached in depth. Despite this, Isherwood’s 'Goodbye to Berlin' is more a novel of the city than a novel about a city. Many other writers of the 30s had chosen Berlin as elective site for expatriation, because it was seen as a locus of history in the making, a city of history.

In Berlin, the author could find both inspiration for his works and a personal freedom he could not find at home. During Isherwood’s stay, Berlin was in the last throes of the Republic of Weimar and at the centre of a cultural and artistic innovation it was also a place renowned for its sexual freedom, and that was quite appealing to upper class homosexuals. The author makes clear that his stay was due more to the satisfaction of his sexual desires and less to the gathering of material for his autobiographical novels 'Mr Norris Changes Trains' (1935) and 'Goodbye to Berlin' (1939). Christopher Isherwood, in his autobiography 'Christopher and his Kind', published in 1976, offers a candid version of his bohemian sojourn in Berlin at the beginning of the 20th Century.

Author goodbye to berlin