Christopher Isherwood residence

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) lived at Nollendorfstraße 17 from March 1929 to May 1933, in a boarding house run by Fräulein Meta Thurau. His four years there — teaching English by day, cruising the Schöneberg queer bars by night — produced the stories that became *Mr Norris Changes Trains* (1935), *Goodbye to Berlin* (1939), and via Van Druten's play *I Am a Camera* (1951) and John Kander and Fred Ebb's musical *Cabaret* (1966) and Bob Fosse's 1972 film, the dominant Anglophone image of Weimar Berlin. The boarding house room Isherwood took, and the tenant of his 1929 room (Jean Ross, whom he named "Sally Bowles"), are the direct source of much of *Goodbye to Berlin*. He shared his time at Nollendorfstraße with W.H. Auden (who visited repeatedly) and Stephen Spender. His long relationships with young German men — Berthold Szczesny in 1930, Heinz Neddermeyer from 1932 — were the reason he chose Berlin over a safer London literary life. A blue-and-white ceramic Gedenktafel was installed by the Berlin senate in 1998, next to the front door. The building itself is a five-storey neo-baroque apartment block, unremarkable from the street but preserved on the interior; the ground floor is currently a language school and the upper floors are private apartments. A visit is a sidewalk moment: read the plaque, look up at the first-floor windows where Isherwood's room was, and think about the same street he crossed to get to Eldorado ten minutes away. Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn is 100 metres away. Free, 24/7.