I'm the kind of person every man thinks he wants until he really gets me and realises he doesn't. The novella Goodbye to Berlin, which evokes the excess and repression of Berlin society together with its glitz and filth, served as the basis for Cabaret. The lives of affluent Jewish heiress Natalia Landauer, a lesbian couple named Peter and Otto, a gay English upper-class waif named Sally Bowles, and other characters are depicted by Isherwood as being threatened by the advent of the Nazis.