He died on January 3, 1986, three and a half years before the wall fell and reunited both a war-torn Berlin and the whole of Germany. Today, many sad realities later, Berlin is thriving in a way Isherwood had never dreamt possible. Isherwood would leave one week later on May 13, writing, “And now the day which seemed too good, too bad to be true, the day when I should leave Germany, has arrived, and I only know about the future that, however often and however variously I have imagined it to myself, the reality will be quite different.”

He was out of town on tour, and never returned to his home in Berlin. Hirschfeld’s libraries were burned by the Nazis on May 6, 1933.

“ I only know about the future that, however often and however variously I have imagined it to myself, the reality will be quite different.” Hence: “I am a camera.” And what a time to witness: This was at the height of Magnus Hirschfeld’s monumental and conclusive research on homosexuality, which paved the way for our understanding of gender variance and for the first gender-affirmation surgeries. He kept diaries of his daily life, blending in to the background of this cinematic setting in order to maintain a critical, curious eye. Isherwood’s strength as a writer bloomed with his observations of people like Ross, and of other young gay men who “found” themselves in Berlin. (Ross wasn’t so good at singing and dancing, as it would turn out, though the stage and screen renditions of Ms. Ross would be the inspiration for the character Sally Bowles, most famously brought to life by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, the film inspired by Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin. It was in that apartment that Isherwood met Jean Ross, the successful journalist and activist who wished instead for a life as a cabaret artist. So he boarded the day-long train from London to Berlin, sojourning for just a few weeks at first but eventually spending nearly two and a half years in the Schöneberg flat he shared with a dozen other lost souls. Before he became one of Berlin’s defining literary voices, Isherwood defied his mother’s wishes by moving to the German capital in the first place-a choice he made because, as he writes in his autobiography, Christopher and His Kind, “Berlin meant boys.” Tsk tsk. The English writer Christopher Isherwood never did as he was told.

Author of goodbye to berlin