A now-vanished time and place that W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lived, wrote and slept together. 

Auden & Isherwood: The Berlin Years traces a brief, combustible period when two young English writers found themselves in Weimar Berlin on the eve of collapse. Drawing on letters, journals, and close textual reading, Edward Mendelson reconstructs how the city shaped both writers’ politics, aesthetics, and sense of moral responsibility — before history foreclosed the experiment entirely.

Berlin is here in all of its sexual freedom colliding with economic ruin, artistic experimentation shadowed by rising fascism. Mendelson is attentive to how lived experience translated into form, showing how Auden’s poetry and Isherwood’s fiction absorbed the city’s contradictions without romanticising them.