One of the most noticeable things in Berlin Stories to me was the idea of side-by-side metropolitan worlds. In the scene in which Frl. Schroeder and Frl. Mayr are eavesdropping on their Jewish downstairs neighbor, around pg. 216, the scene—thin boundaries around personal, urban lives—became especially conspicuous to me. One of the things I remember hearing about frequently while studying abroad was the many, side-by-side worlds coexisting in an old college town, all the conglomerated stories and histories divided by a door or a hallway. That’s where all the fantasy stories of parallel worlds and mystic passages just around the next corner come from, says popular university legend.

That romanticized view of many lives and histories is portrayed in a much less fluffed and idealized rendition in this scene. An “ardent Nazi” revels in overhearing the suffering of a neighbor; that neighbor has eliminated personal boundaries in her life by “advertising for a husband” in the paper. The publicity of the neighbor’s private pain—the gleeful public entertainment of her pain being accessible—was a different kind of “parallel world,” but one in which the word parallel is misleading. A parallel world wouldn’t intersect with its parallel, wouldn’t connect or have an effect on. The tragedy in Isherwood—and the unreality he describes near the end of Goodbye to Berlin—is that these separate lives, jammed up against one another, are not parallel, but have a real and frightening impact on one another, that real moment of personal pain by a neighbor expanding and intensifying on a terrifying scale.