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Showing posts with the label Goodbye to Berlin

Blogging Anniversary - 10 years

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A while ago I checked when I did my first blog post, in order to celebrate with an anniversary post. Well, that day came and went without any reaction from me. Better late than never, so here a reminder of my very first blog post from 24 October 2012.  The book was New Finnish Grammar  by Diego Marani. Marani is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. It was a suitable book to start with, being a book about letters, languages and memories. With a beautiful prose, the novel went directly to my heart.  "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can ide...
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Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

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A famous novel, that to a new audience is probably more known as the musical Cabaret . This book was a very positive surprise for me. All I knew was that Cabaret is based on the novel, but it is so much more. It is a semi-autobiographical account of Isherwood's time in Berlin during the 1930s. It describes the pre-Nazi Germany during the Weimar Republic. The novel is really six short stories that are connected. They are titled: "A Berlin Diary" (Autumn 1930), "Sally Bowles" (Cabaret), "On Ruegen Island (Summer 1931), "The Nowaks", "The Landauers" and "A Berlin Diary" (Winter 1932-33). Isherwood is the narrator and the stories describes the situation in the country and the wild array of people he meets. They are all fascinated, outsider kind of characters and give the novel its base. Sally Bowles is an Englishwoman who sings in a local cabaret and she goes through life with her court of admirers. A total free spirit, or is ...
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Cabaret!

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My friend Lena had managed to get tickets to Cabaret  at the National Theatre in Brussels. We were there yesterday and had a fantastic evening with the wonderful songs from this musical. I have only seen the movie version with Liza Minelli before and that was many years ago. It is always fantastic to see the musicals live. The musical is based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin  and tells the story of an innocent american, coming to Berling in the 1930s to write a novel and all the various people he meet there. It is semi-autobiographical, and contains several short stories on the life of people he met in pre-Nazi Germany. It was made into a musical in 1966 and filmed in 1972.
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