The in/hospitable city : Weimar era Berlin through the eyes of the English foreigner

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Berlin during the Weimar era and the in/hospitable experience for the English foreigner in the modernist city. With the implementation of Jacques Derrida’s thoughts on hospitality, this dissertation sets to find out how the city can simultaneously be a hostile and hospitable site for the people who inhabit it, and what this has been contingent on. The first chapter provides a historical and theoretical introduction to the city of Berlin, laying the foundations for the rest of the dissertation. This is followed by a close reading and literary analysis of Christopher Isherwood’s Christopher and His Kind, providing context for his urban fiction set in Berlin as well as allowing for the author’s autobiographical reflections on topics such as home, class, and homosexuality. The third chapter, then, follows directly from the second as the real, lived experience of Isherwood is made fictitious in his Berlin Stories (Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin). This chapter gives attention to the exhibition of hospitality in friendship and touches upon the portrayal of women in the modernist city, in order to find out whether the modernist city could really have allowed men and women the same freedoms. Finally, this dissertation is drawn to a close by looking at Berlin now, approximately one hundred years later, using Derrida’s thoughts on the notion of a city of refuge as a means of questioning whether we can see Berlin as a truly hospitable city, whether there can really be a city of refuge, and what must be done for this to be thought of as reality