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The Berlin Novels

This series transports readers to the tumultuous streets of pre-war Berlin, capturing its vibrant yet precarious atmosphere. It follows the experiences of an outsider navigating a world of eccentric characters and bohemian decadence. Through witty observations and sharp prose, the novels portray a society teetering on the brink of immense change and danger. These stories offer a compelling glimpse into a city and an era shadowed by an impending political storm.

The Berlin novels
Mr. Norris Changes Trains
New Directions - 134: The Berlin Stories
Goodbye to Berlin
The Berlin Stories

Recommended Reading Order

  1. 1

    After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1933 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.

    Mr. Norris Changes Trains
  2. 2

    Goodbye to Berlin

    • 256 pages
    • 9 hours of reading
    4.0(11776)Add rating

    Evokes the decadence, repression, glamour, and sleaze of Berlin in the early 1930s, depicting people at threat from the rise of the Nazis: Jewish heiress Natalia Laundauer, gay lovers Peter and Otto, and an English upper-class waif, the divinely decadent Sally Bowles

    Goodbye to Berlin
  • The Berlin Stories

    • 207 pages
    • 8 hours of reading
    4.1(657)Add rating

    A classic of 20th-century fiction, "Berlin Stories" inspired the Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film "Cabaret." This newly released paperback edition features an Introduction by the acclaimed novelist Maupin.

    The Berlin Stories
  • First published in 1935 and 1939, the two related novels, The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which make up The Berlin Stories are recognized today as classics of modern fiction.A charming city of avenues and cafés, a grotesque city of night-people and fantasts, a dangerous city of vice and intrigue, a powerful city of millionaires and mobs - all this was Berlin in 1931, the period when Hitler was beginning his move to power.Here are Mr. Norris, the improbable old debauchee mysteriously caught in the struggle between Nazis and Communists; plump Fräulein Schroeder, who thinks an operation to reduce the scale of her Büste might relieve her heart palpitations; the Landauers, a distinguished and doomed Jewish family; Sally Bowles, whose misadventures in the demimonde were popularized on the American stage and screen by Julie Harris in "I Am a Camera" and by Liza Minelli in "Cabaret."

    New Directions - 134: The Berlin Stories
  • The Berlin novels

    • 512 pages
    • 18 hours of reading
    4.0(597)Add rating

    Includes Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin , the inspiration for the stage and screen musical Cabaret . It is a haunting evocation of the gathering storm of the Nazi terror and a portrait of Bohemian Berlin - a city and a world on the very brink of ruin.

    The Berlin novels