Literary Connections: German Expressionism

“Sally Bowles” by Christopher Isherwood and Kirchner's German Expressionism

        Christopher Isherwood's “Sally Bowles” paints the story of a nineteen year old actress from England living in Berlin in 1930. A cabaret singer hoping to find fame, Sally also makes lovers of older, wealthy men. While Sally did not have a particularly womanly figure, she wore crimson lipstick, heavy eye makeup, eyebrow penciling and powdered her face to compensate. The narrator comments that he sees Sally wearing black most of the time, which blends in with her dark hair; he also remarks on the detail of her green-painted fingernails. If she sounds familiar, it's because Sally also appears in Cabaret.


         Ernst Kirchner belonged to the group of German Expressionists known as Die Brücke (The Bridge). The group focused on expressing concentrated emotion through their use of color, which tended to be unnatural, lending itself to a more abstract feel. In addition to emotion, the group often painted with sexual themes.


         The ties between this German Expressionist movement and Sally can be seen through both Kirchner and Isherwood's deliberate use of color, and through the sexualization of a young woman, still with a boyish body. In Kirchner's paintings Marzella (1909-10) and Artistin Marcella (1910), a young woman is painted in two different ways.

Marzella by Ernst Kirchner (German); 1909-1910; oil.
Location: Stockholm, Sweden; Moderna Museet.

        In Marzella, the viewer is confronted with a nude young woman, sitting with her arms resting atop her crossed legs. The girl has a white bow in her dark, side-parted hair, dark, well-defined eyebrows, darkly outlined eyes and crimson lips. One can imagine this naked boyish figure to be parallel to Sally, as a sexualized young girl hiding behind her makeup, attempting to appear older. While the girl's skin is a nude, peachy color, it also appears drab with olive and gray tones, effectively removing the force of life from her skin. The girls face, just like Sally's, is lighter than the rest of her body, drawing attention to the girl's dark raccoon-like eyes. The lines of the painting range from horizontal and vertical to diagonal and round, anchoring the painting with a diagonally placed but horizontally-oriented cushion upon which the girl sits; these varying directionalities lend a sense of disorder or anguish, a key emotion in German Expressionism.

Artistin Marcella by Ernst Kirchner (German); 1910; oil.
Location: Berlin, Germany; Brücke Museum.

        In Kirchner's Artistin Marcella, another young woman is portrayed, but this time in a different way. The girl half-laying on a hunter green sofa has one foot on the floor and the other opposite her body on the cushion, her thighs still in contact. She rests her upper body on one arm, outstretched to the cushion, and the other arm propped across her body on the sofa arm, with her chin in her hand, hiding her mouth. The girl wears a dress striped in two shades of green, blue and black striped socks and red slippers. The walls and floor in the room are green and there are differently colored bottles behind the girl, in a doorway leading to a blue room. A white cat lays curled up next to her on the sofa. Both paintings feature multi-directional lines, but the girl in this painting is not overtly sexualized as before. Instead, the girl appears to be in thought, with a bromidic expression. The girls skin appears dark, but lively and more natural than the previous painting, and the girl wears no obvious makeup.

        In relating both paintings directly to the character of Sally Bowles, it is possible to conceive that the second painting is Sally before she embarks on her journey to reach fame in Berlin, perhaps at her parents' English home, daydreaming. The first painting, more jarring as the girl stares right into the viewer's eyes, could be seen as Sally as the reader knows her—a sexualized girl, attempting to gain a certain lifestyle and wealth through pleasing men—with colors depicting disharmony, having a certain contamination in the tones.  Both girls, much like Sally, seem to be looking for something more than the heartache they are familiar with.