THE SIX PIECES contained in this volume form a roughly continuous narrative. They are the only existing fragments of what was originally planned as a huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin. I had intended to call it The Lost. My old title has been changed, however; it is too grandiose for this short loosely connected sequence of diaries and sketches.
Readers of Mr Norris Changes Trains (published in the United States as The Last of Mr Norris) may notice that certain characters and situations in that novel overlap and contradict what I have written here — Sally Bowles, for instance, would have run into Mr Norris on Frl. Schroeder's staircase; Christopher Isherwood would certainly have come home one evening to find William Bradshaw asleep in his bed. The explanation is simple: The adventures of Mr Norris once formed part of The Lost itself.
Because I have given my own name to the "I" of this narrative, readers are certainly not entitled to assume that its pages are purely autobiographical, or that its characters are libellously exact portraits of living persons. "Christopher Isherwood" is a convenient ventriloquist's dummy, nothing more.
The first Berlin Diary, The Nowaks, and The Landauers have already appeared, in John Lehmann's New Writing. Of these, Berlin Diary and The Nowaks and also the second Berlin Diary have appeared in his Penguin New Writing. Sally Bowles was originally published as a separate volume by The Hogarth Press.
C. I.
September 1935
