We are Christopher Isherwood, watching the scenes in the Berlin street below from our apartment window above.

Watching from afar further shifts in a worsening polity

The Berlin novels and notebooks of Christopher Isherwood from the early 1930s contain fascinating characters - even though the apparent real-life inspirations for the likes of Sally Bowles (Jean Ross) and Arthur Norris (Gerald Hamilton) were somewhat different from their fictional counterparts.

But the most fascinating - and complex - creations in those works were the narrators - sometimes “Christopher Isherwood” (in inverted commas), sometimes William Bradshaw.

Do not be taken in by the deft misdirections of the narrator:

“I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

The narrator is not any passive camera, though he wants you to think so.

(For, as always, Isherwood is very charming.)

He is instead skilfully writing about difficult subjects - including the visible slide to Nazism and barbarity all around him - while making you feel you are working these things out for yourself from the details he provides.

He says he is recording, not thinking - but he is very much making you think.

*

Like Isherwood - or “Isherwood” - walking the Berlin streets or looking down from his apartment window, we all - via social media and mobile phone footage - can now have glimpses of an ever-worsening situation in the United States (and also elsewhere).

And again like those reading his narrative, we can put two and two together and realise what is going on in what we don’t glimpse - which is not reported on social (or mainstream) media or recorded on mobile devices.

What happened yesterday to a woman in Minnesota was horrific - and yet we know that it cannot be unique. One can tell that the distinctive quality of this incident is that it was caught on camera when many others are not. There is no reason to believe it was a one-off.

As such anyone watching can tell what is happening off-camera - but, as with Isherwood and others in the early 1930s, there is very little which we can do (especially from the other side of the Atlantic).

(And, which is a fair point, the well-documented record of the United Kingdom state in killing and torturing people in Northern Ireland, Kenya, Iraq and Afghanistan confers on us no moral superiority.)

*

No slide towards barbarity and Fascism is inevitable: even in the 1930s some countries were able to steer their polities in a different direction. Little or nothing is bound to happen in human affairs. Things can change for better, and sometimes do.

But nonetheless the sense of dread and doom that must have been a feature of the early 1930s is sometimes inescapable.

The evidence from our virtual apartment window does not point in an encouraging direction.