‘Restoring friendship and confidence as far as possible between the inimical nations’: Post-World War I Berlin through English eyes

Abstract

Three British women writers and their memoirs or letters serve as the key witnesses to rapid change from war-torn Berlin to a highly desired tourist destination. The war-induced transition of Berlin was matched by the social changes for women whose traces can be found in the three texts: the writer’s position changes from that of the voyeuse to the flâneuse. While the old aristocratic cosmopolitanism in Evelyn Blücher’s and Helen D’Abernon’s circles was on the wane, a more middle-class cosmopolitanism, as exemplified by the Bloomsbury psychoanalyst and translator Alix Strachey, became more important in the aftermath of World War I. The three writers share an interest in social observation, but all three are tied by their particular upper-middle- or upper-class habitus. An image of Berlin emerges which predates Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin myth by at least a decade.