The Berlin Stories

A classic of 20th-century fiction, The Berlin Stories inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film Cabaret.

First published in the 1930s, The Berlin Stories contains two astonishing related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin,
which are recognized today as classics of modern fiction. 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—this is the period when Hitler was beginning his
move to power. The Berlin Stories is inhabited by a wealth of
characters: the unforgettable Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the
demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie
Harris in I Am A Camera and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret;
Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught between
the Nazis and the Communists; plump Fräulein Schroeder, who thinks an
operation to reduce the scale of her Büste might relieve her heart
palpitations; and the distinguished and doomed Jewish family, the
Landauers.