‘Berlin meant Boys.’1 Christopher Isherwood’s retrospective summary
of the appeal of Germany for some of the writers of the 1930s
set the tone for the rather limited critical evaluation of a very interesting
feature of 1930s writing that was to follow. Almost every
critical study of Auden, Isherwood and Spender feels obliged to make
at least cursory reference to the fact that Germany represented some
kind of libidinous homosexual nirvana. Atelling example is Valentine
Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties. There he writes: ‘Germany
was now the place to be: for artistic progressivism, but also
because there sunshine and cocaine and sex, especially homosex,
were up until Hitler’s intervention in 1933 so freely available. Berlin
was a mythic sodom, and a sodomites’ mythic nirvana. The British
homosexuals excitedly went there to ‘live’.’2 I would like to add to
this narrow and biased view some important and less simplistic
aspects. I will try to show that the lure of Germany also touches on
issues of class, politics and nationality. I will try to present the related
transgressions that result from this entanglement not so much as biographical
achievements or failures, but explore how they feature in
the literary production of the writers of the era.