Goodbye to Berlin: Chapter 2: Sally Bowles Summary & Analysis

One afternoon that October, Christopher’s friend Fritz Wendel invites him over for coffee. Fritz takes pride in his coffee and makes it very strong. Fritz also invites Sally Bowles, another English expat, to coffee. Sally arrives and almost immediately makes a call to a lover of hers. Afterward, the three talk about love and why Fritz has not settled down. At the end of the afternoon, Sally invites Christopher to have tea with her sometime. After Sally leaves, Fritz tells Christopher that he’s crazy about Sally.

A few days after their coffee, Fritz and Christopher go to see Sally sing at a club called the Lady Windermere. Christopher describes her performance as striking and effective, if not technically good. The crowd reacts favorably to Sally, and she spends the evening trying to chat with potentially wealthy men. Christopher doesn’t enjoy the club and vows to himself to never visit that type of place again.

After Christopher sees Sally perform, she calls to invite him for tea. She mixes a “prairie oyster,” which is egg and Worcestershire sauce, her strategy of eating cheaply.  She tells him her story of coming to Berlin. She had come with an older actress friend, but that friend left with a banker. Christopher learns that she is only 19 years old—he’d assumed that she is in her 20s. She tells him about her family. Both of her parents are English, though she told Fritz that her mother is French. Sally’s future after her job at the Lady Windermere ends is uncertain, and Christopher offers to help her out if she ever needs money. Sally laughs, saying that she could immediately tell that Christopher has no money either.

Later on, when Christopher invites Sally to tea at his boardinghouse, Frl. Schroeder is very excited about a possible romance between the two of them. She takes great care in setting the tea. Sally arrives and begins telling Christopher about her new lover. When Sally presses Christopher for his opinion, he tells her that talking about sex and lovers bores him. He tells her that no number of men she has sex with can change who she really is. As they talk, Christopher starts laughing and tells her that he always laughs when he is with people he likes. Sally expresses that she is glad that Christopher is not in love with her, as that would ruin everything.

On New Year’s Eve, Sally comes to live in Frl. Kost’s old room in Frl. Schroeder’s boardinghouse. The boarders all have dinner together. Afterward, Sally and Christopher accompany Bobby to the Troika. There, they meet up with Fritz, who introduces Christopher to Klaus Linke (Sally’s former accompanying pianist). They all have a wild night. Sally returns to the boardinghouse the next afternoon, having spent the night with Klaus. She tells Christopher that she and Klaus have fallen in love, and they begin seeing each other every day.

A couple of weeks later, Klaus suddenly leaves Berlin to go to England for a job synchronizing music for films. Sally spends the next day writing poems. She tells Christopher that she will never marry Klaus, as it would ruin their careers. When Klaus’s first letter arrives, detailing his misery in England and expressing his love for Sally, Sally is delighted, but Christopher suspects it is not genuine. A week letter, Sally receives another letter from Klaus: he tells her that he has fallen in love with someone else, and he urges her to focus on her work. Christopher and Sally go to the cinema and laugh at a film about a woman who sacrifices her career to become a wife and mother.

After Sally and Klaus’s breakup, Sally and Christopher spend all day every day together talking about the future. Sally has wild mood swings and suspects she may be pregnant, but she does not go see a doctor. One night, Sally’s mood improves, and they decide to go out. At the Troika that evening, they meet Clive, a rich American who is constantly drunk.

Sally and Christopher start seeing Clive almost every day, either separately or together. Clive is very generous, sending cars to pick the other two up, paying for meals and drinks, and buying them gifts. One day, Christopher arrives to plans with Sally and Clive to find that they had spontaneously flown to Dresden to shop. They return with beautiful shirts for Christopher. Sally says she chose the shirts for Christopher rather than something more expensive because she does not want Clive to think that they are gold-diggers. Sally hopes to have Clive bankroll her acting career, and she is often frustrated when he does not want to talk business.

One day, Clive begins to make plans for the three of them to travel the world together. Christopher reflects on the power of Clive’s wealth: these experiences are so banal to Clive himself, but they would be life changing for Christopher and Sally. However, the next day, Sally and Christopher arrive at Clive’s hotel to find that he had checked out that morning to travel to Budapest, leaving Sally and Christopher 300 marks. Though Sally and Christopher are angry, they manage to laugh about the incident.

The next morning, Sally feels ill. Christopher and Frl. Schroeder call in the doctor to examine her, and the doctor determines that she is pregnant. Sally tells Christopher that the father of the baby is Klaus, and that she plans to have an abortion (although the doctor who examined her refused to perform it). Sally uses the money from Clive to pay for a reputable doctor and nursing home. Christopher, Frl. Schroeder, Bobby, Frl. Mayr, and Fritz all visit her, though they do not tell Fritz the true reason that Sally is there. In order to protect Sally’s reputation, Christopher pretends to be the father of the baby who is forcing her to abort the child. At first, Sally seems dazed during her stay. However, she begins to feel better. On her final day in the nursing home, she expresses a longing to be a mother but a lack of trust in men, including Christopher.

After the chaos of Sally’s pregnancy, Christopher decides to take a trip to the Baltics to work on his writing. He reflects that he has hardly written since becoming close with Sally. Sally is happy for him, and, as Christopher suspects, a little bit relieved to have space. She says she might join him, but Christopher suspects, correctly, that she will not.

Christopher returns to Berlin in July. He and Sally have not had much contact—they only sent each other few postcards throughout the first month of his trip. When he comes back, he finds out that Sally has moved away from Frl. Schroeder’s boardinghouse, much to Frl. Schroeder’s disappointment. She tells Christopher that she always hoped that he and Sally would get married. The next morning, Frl. Schroeder wakes Christopher to tell him that a major German bank has shut down. He goes outside into the angry crowd and reads alarmist headlines about the economy, though Christopher does not believe the economy will truly go into crisis.

That evening, Christopher goes to visit Sally at the Artists’ Colony where she lives. Their visit is awkward—Christopher notices that Sally seems to avoid his eyes. She tells him that she left Frl. Schroeder’s boardinghouse out of boredom. During their visit, she picks up a phone call and begins to leave for an appointment, ignoring Christopher’s teasing about her new boyfriends. Christopher asks when they will see each other again, and Sally tells him that she is busy and will have to see. As they leave her apartment, Christopher mentions the bank shut down, and Sally briefly panics. They part ways.

A week after their reunion, Sally calls Christopher and asks him to do a favor for her, for which he will earn money. When he arrives at her apartment, she asks him to write an article about “the English girl” for a friend’s magazine, due that day. After he writes the article, Sally tells him it isn’t “snappy” enough and calls a screenwriter she knows, Kurt, to do it for her. She sings Kurt’s praises to Christopher, and then she disparages young men who call themselves authors but are not prolific or wealthy. Christopher takes issue with this, and the two have an argument. She tells Christopher that his lack of ambition annoys her, and he insults her new financier friends. They agree that they have outgrown each other, and then Christopher leaves.

As Christopher leaves Sally’s apartment, he feels angry and embarrassed. He wishes to hurt Sally, as he believes Sally took pleasure in hurting him. Christopher offhandedly wonders whether this extreme anger is a result of actually having been in love with Sally, but he concludes that it is a result of his wounded vanity. He is angry at himself for mismanaging the interaction, showing her vulnerability rather than impressing her. He decides he will never see Sally again.

A couple of weeks later, Christopher gets a visit from a man who calls himself George P. Sandars. Though George found Christopher’s address through his advertisement for English lessons, he does not want to learn English. Instead, he asks Christopher to loan him 200 marks, telling him about a rich man who would vouch for his ability to return the money. When Christopher does not lend him the money, George asks if he knows any actresses who may be looking for a business opportunity. Christopher vindictively gives him Sally’s address, wanting to subject Sally to this annoyance.

A few days later, Sally calls Christopher asking for help. Though he is hesitant, he tells her to come see him. When she arrives, she tells him that a man who called himself Paul Rakowski had come to her apartment to tell her about an acting opportunity. He told her that he was a successful agent, relaying Hollywood stories. They had sex together and went for a fancy dinner. However, when the bill arrived, he asked Sally to lend him the money. She did, and they spent the night together at a shabby hotel. In the morning, after faking a conversation on the hotel phone, he stole the rest of Sally’s money, left her in the room, and did not come back. Christopher and Sally determine that Paul Rakowski is George P. Sandars, and Christopher confesses to Sally that the incident is partially his fault.

Christopher and Sally go to the police station to report the incident. When the police officers question Sally about why she went to the hotel with Paul/George after their dinner, she tells them that he was her fiancé—she claims they’d gotten engaged over the course of the evening. The officers burst out laughing and tell Sally they’ll help her. As they leave the station, Christopher compliments Sally on her lie that the man was her fiancé. She tells him that it was not a lie, and she really had gotten swept up in the passion of the day. They laugh together.

Over a week later, the police call Christopher to identify the man. They find him in a café. Christopher, seeing how young, shabby, and frazzled the man looks, nearly does not identify him. Still, he points him out to the police, vowing to himself never to help the police again. A few days later, Sally goes to see the man in the police station. She tells Christopher that the police have sentenced him to a mental institution. She also tells him that the man is really a boy of 16 years old.

Sally and Christopher make up, though they never see each other again. Two weeks later, Christopher receives a postcard from Sally in Paris saying she will write later. A month later, he receives a similar postcard from Rome. That postcard was the last time Christopher heard from Sally, six years before his writing of the story. He concludes the story urging Sally to accept it as a tribute to her and to their friendship and asking her to send another postcard.