Ned Beauman's novel The Teleportation Accident (2013) features a queer Englishman named Rupert Rackenham, a bisexual ex-public schoolboy, hanger-on to the Weimar Berlin cultural scene, and clearly a composite for the “Auden gang.” Always toting a Leica camera (the favored make of the group), Rackenham stalks Berlin for material, ruthlessly exploiting the cultural scenes he encounters for journalistic and novelistic copy. But Rackenham's claim to any form of photographic record is false: his camera case is empty, hollowed out to stash the cocaine he sells to make cash. Beauman's recent depiction is perhaps the most satirically biting in a series of representations of the Auden group's supposedly parasitic relationship to Weimar culture, and more specifically Christopher Isherwood's apparently apolitical camera-eye gaze, a mere alibi for unbridled hedonism. Indeed, Isherwood's long stay in the city has become paradigmatic for an opposition between the frivolous pleasures of Weimar sexual freedom – “Isherwood's Berlin,” as it has come to be known – and the serious business of interwar German politics, at which, so the story goes, the hedonistic Isherwood gazes either passively or exploitatively.

Indeed, Isherwood's famous statement of self-instrumentalization, “I am a camera,” is at once the most cited and the most misread phrase in his authorship. It has commonly been seen as a trope for Isherwood's detached, “passive” documentary method, often involving a crude conflation of Isherwood's narrator with his authorial position. Labeling the queer writer a passive observer, this interpretation insists upon the superficiality of Isherwood's leftist commitment in the 1930s, bolstering the view of his “parlour socialism” advanced by Isherwood himself in later life. On one level this is rather surprising, given the solidly Marxist credentials of the two other best-known contemporary exponents of the camera-eye trope: John Dos Passos and Dziga Vertov are hardly generally considered to be “dazzled spectator[s] of commodity culture,” as one reading of The Berlin Stories (1935–9) remarks of Isherwood's authorial perspective. Even sophisticated discussions rearticulate a sense of Isherwood's wavering political commitment. Michael North rightly points out that Isherwood's camera-eye does not reveal a belief in the camera as “dispassionate and disengaged,” and yet he still argues that, for Isherwood, “observation was almost essentially distinct from action,” separating Isherwood from more “confident” practitioners of the documentary style. And in the most extreme, most glaringly heteronormative version of this position, the supposed passivity of Isherwood's camera-eye obviates the possibility of observation itself.