Goodbye To Berlin

Isherwood spends the summer of 1931 in a beach house on Ruegen Island with Peter Wilkinson, an Englishman about Isherwood’s age, and Otto Nowak, a German working-class boy of about 16 or 17. Isherwood describes how, earlier in his life, Peter had difficulties with school, his family, and his family’s wealth. Peter has had multiple nervous breakdowns and has seen different analysts to ease his anxiety. Otto’s presence at the beach house has a way of relieving Peter’s anxieties and neuroses when they are together. The two men have a certain kind of unspoken relationship that is only alluded to during the chapter, but the reader is meant to understand that Peter is romantically interested in Otto.

Otto and Peter have several arguments about Otto’s behavior. Otto goes out at night to dance while Peter jealously waits up for him to return. Peter seems to want to keep Otto all to himself while Otto enjoys going out and flirting with women and stringing Peter along.

Isherwood, Peter, and Otto meet a surgeon from a Berlin hospital. The doctor is an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and tells Isherwood that communism is “just a hallucination. A mental disease” (87).