Drawing on contemporary material, including Auden’s unpublished diary, this book places personal experience in the context of the life of Berlin - not only its political, artistic and cultural life, but the life of the streets, bars and cafes. The biography brings together a major phase in the life of Auden, Isherwood, and the city. It presents portraits of figures with whom Auden and Isherwood came into contact, and it demonstrates how, especially in Isherwood’s fiction, the material of daily existence was transformed into literature. The wide scope of this study, which ranges from poetry and cinema to street violence and prostitution, provides a detailed context for its account of two writers engaged in the process of self-definition.