35 Christopher Isherwood, Mr. Norris Changes Trains (1935)

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Berlin in the 1970s: a bleak, divided city still haunted by its Nazi past. Disreputable and forbidding, it was a magnet for artists and activists as well as the source of the best new music—Neu!, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream. Bowie and Iggy Pop moved there in August 1976, renting an unassuming flat at 155 Hauptstrasse in the mostly Turkish Schöneberg district.

Bowie was twenty-nine and almost broke; addicted to fame, yet bored with its trappings. Berlin would be a sanctuary for him, a place where he could recharge his creative batteries. Conveniently, he already had a spiritual guide to the city’s dark mysteries: Christopher Isherwood.

Isherwood’s two semiautobiographical “Berlin novels,” of which Mr. Norris Changes Trains is the first and 1939’s Goodbye to Berlin the second, would probably have come to Bowie’s attention in their various adapted forms, most famously John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret. Judi Dench played Sally Bowles in Cabaret’s 1968 London run, and the 1972 film version had a powerful influence on the Ziggy Stardust stage shows. Although some credit Bowie’s first manager, Kenneth Pitt, who accompanied the singer on his first trip to Berlin in October 1969, with introducing him to Isherwood’s work. Pitt would have encouraged Bowie to watch the BBC’s Omnibus documentary on Isherwood, “A Born Foreigner,” broadcast upon their return in early November. But Bowie rediscovered Isherwood during his mid-1970s LA phase and met him when the author popped backstage with artist David Hockney to say hello after watching the singer perform in the city in March 1976. (The two remained friendly: four years later Isherwood was in the audience on the opening night of The Elephant Man.)

Emaciated and cocaine-addicted, Bowie developed a romantic fixation with Weimar Berlin—a place where, as Isherwood put it, hate had a habit of erupting suddenly out of nowhere. Divining the source of this hate, Bowie created the occult-obsessed Nietzschean overlord the Thin White Duke for his album Station to Station. Not long after, he plotted an escape route from excess, for himself and Pop, that was a knowing reversal of the journey Isherwood and his lover/mentor W. H. Auden had made in 1939 when the pair fled Berlin for America.

Prickly, aloof Isherwood had moved to Berlin in 1928, quitting his medical studies in Britain to become a long-term sex tourist in a city renowned for its sparkling degeneracy and obliging rent boys. Mr. Norris Changes Trains chronicles rather coyly his adventures there as the Nazis’ grip tightens, focusing on the relationship between passive, camera-like narrator William Bradshaw (Isherwood, essentially) and Arthur Norris, a fraudulent, beguilingly camp opportunist of indeterminate profession.

Their first, memorable encounter is on a train. Norris, sweatily terrified, is traveling with a false passport. Isherwood/Bradshaw takes callous pleasure in Norris’s grotesque appearance—his ludicrous, ill-fitting wig; his enormous, misshapen nose; his terrible teeth like broken rocks. But despite his looks, and beneath the charming surface, Norris is inscrutable. Isherwood based him on fellow expat Gerald Hamilton, a shadowy, self-invented figure who was at various points a spy, a Communist agitator and, supposedly, a roommate of Aleister Crowley.

Isherwood loved Berlin for the boys, but also because he believed forcible dislocation made him a better novelist, the sort of novelist Auden was always telling him he could be. As it transpired, his Berlin novels were an artistic high it would take him until 1964 and A Single Man (filmed in 2010 by Tom Ford) to reach again.

Embracing what Isherwood called the mystery-magic of foreignness, Bowie and Pop reinvented themselves in Berlin. They also partied hard, as Isherwood had, with the help of scenesters such as Bowie’s transgender lover and muse Romy Haag. Somewhere along the line Bowie found time to finish off Low and record the whole of “Heroes” with Brian Eno and Tony Visconti at the dilapidated Hansa studios in the shadow of the Berlin Wall.