SOURCE: Thomas, Peter. “‘Camp’ and Politics in Isherwood's Berlin Fiction.” Journal of Modern Literature 5, no. 1 (February 1976): 117-30.

In the following essay, Thomas traces Isherwood's utilization of Camp motifs in his work.

The agonizing of the “Auden generation” over their support for leftish causes called forth a good deal of suspicion at the time, and George Orwell's description of the typical English bourgeois intellectual of the Thirties crystallizes this feeling:

It is the same pattern all the time; public school, university, a few trips abroad, then London. Hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, war, prison, persecution, manual labour—hardly even words.¹

While Christopher Isherwood's life in Berlin appeared to remove at least some of these disabilities, the confessional tone of his writings could also be seen, from the hostile viewpoint, to express a kind of political exhibitionism. Sympathy for the oppressed was one thing; wringing one's hands and proclaiming personal inadequacy...