Translated by Cyrus Brooks
Introduction by Rodney Livingstone

Originally published in German in 1931 and in this English translation in 1932, this novel of the end of the Weimar Republic tells of the life and death of a Berlin advertising copywriter, Jacob Fabian, whose inner and outer worlds are collapsing about him. The vividly sketched men and women, some endearing, some sinister, with whom he is willingly or unwillingly involved are all – like Fabian and his best friend, Stephen Labude – struggling to preserve and live out their private lives at a time when civil, public life is in the process of terminal breakdown.

The critic Michael Sadler called it ‘graceful, vivid and distinguished … a little masterpiece of pathos and calamity’ (New Statesman). A later reviewer wrote: ‘Fabian … damned for its inevitably improper subject-matter, showed the crumbling Berlin of Christopher Isherwood’s stories with something of Isherwood’s sharp intelligence, but a far more tragic and despairing sense of implication (Times Literary Supplement).

The original English translation of Fabian was expurgated. This new, completely reset edition restores the cuts to sexually explicit scenes.

Published by Libris in 1990