“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Isherwood may only be referring to his behavior at the very opening of the novel while he’s at his window, but this quote could easily apply to Isherwood as a writer as well. Isherwood’s heavy reliance on observational detail informs much of the novel’s style.

“Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire’s slum.”

Isherwood spends time with two very different families: the Nowaks and the Landauers. Both families are victims of their economic circumstances. While it might be easy to see the problems associated with poverty, wealth brings its own paranoia and enemies.

“Like everyone else in Berlin, she refers continually to the political situation, but only briefly, with a conventional melancholy, as when one speaks of religion.”

Frl. Hippi, like others in Berlin, sees the rise of Nazism as something beyond her control. It is something ubiquitous—something that exists around a person, rather than something a person can affect. This view is likely to engender apathy about politics.