Irmgard Keun (1905–1982)
Author of The Artificial Silk Girl
Works by Irmgard Keun
Barn af verden 1 copy
Associated Works
Kinder sind auch Menschen : Heiteres gezeichnet und geschrieben für alle, die Kinder lieben — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Tralow, Charlotte
- Birthdate
- 1905-02-06
- Date of death
- 1982-05-05
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- Harriott, Clara Morris
stenographer
novelist - Awards and honors
- Marieluise-Fleißer-Preis (1981)
- Relationships
- Tralow, Johannes (spouse)
Roth, Joseph (lover)
Zweig, Stefan (friend) - Short biography
- Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin and attended a Lutheran girls' school in Cologne. She supported herself as a stenographer while originally pursuing an acting career. In 1931, at age 26, she burst onto the German literary scene with two radical novels that became bestsellers: Gilgi--One of Us, and The Artificial Silk Girl. They portrayed young women shedding conventional roles and adopting more modern and urban lives. The Nazi regime called the books "anti-German" and blacklisted them. After a fruitless lawsuit against the Gestapo for lost royalties, Irmgard Keun was forced into a wandering exile around Europe. She befriended a number of fellow German émigré writers and intellectuals including Stefan Zweig and Heinrich Mann, and was romantically involved with Joseph Roth. In 1940, she arranged for a newspaper to report that she had committed suicide. Using a false passport in the name of Charlotte Tralow, she then managed to smuggle herself back into Germany, where she survived the war. During this turbulent period, she produced two masterworks: After Midnight (1937), now considered one of the most powerful first-hand portrayals of life under Nazism, and Child of All Nations (1938). In the 1960s, she spent several years in a psychiatric hospital in Bonn. At the end of her life, she was finally recognized as one of Germany's groundbreaking and most courageous authors.
- Nationality
- Germany
- Birthplace
- Berlin, Germany
- Places of residence
- Berlin, Germany
Cologne, Germany
Greifswald, Germany
Hamburg, Germany
Ostend, Belgium (exiled from Germany)
Holland (exiled from Germany) - Place of death
- Cologne, Germany
- Burial location
- Friedhof Melaten, Cologne, Germany
- Associated Place (for map)
- Germany
Members
Reviews
It is difficult to conceive of coming of age in a society where politics permeates and controls all aspects of life, from relationships to what you say or do. Even firsthand accounts of life in places like Nazi Germany are limited because they can largely reflect only the perspective of the author. As a result, novels by contemporary German writers often seem to carry as much or more impact on understanding the times. Irmgard Keun's After Midnight is a notable part of that canon.
Susanne show more "Sanna" Moder, the narrator of the slim novel, uses almost naive political impressions, the views of others and her memories in casting cast an indelible portrait of "ordinary" life at the time. In part a love story set in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930s, even Senna's simple, ingenue-like life is affected almost daily by Nazism and politics.
Keun's book, written and first published in 1937 after she fled Germany, portrays Sanna as somewhat vacuous or at least generally ignorant of political details. To her, dresses, parties and love are the most important things in her life. When she hears speeches warning that those who impede the Nazi program will be smashed, her "heart stands still ... because how do I know I'm not one of the sort who are going to be smashed?" But she is clever. Despite admitting she admits she doesn't understand the nuances, she does know there are simply certain things you shouldn't talk about or do. Yet her observations, often unintentionally sardonic, help reveal life and society under Nazism. For example, when someone says Hitler united the whole German nation, Sanna thinks that's fine but "it's just that the people making up the whole German nation don't get on with each other."
Personal relationships certainly aren't exempt. Sanna and her girlfriend, Gerti, are interested in their love lives and the story's ultimate resolution revolves in large part around Sanna and the man she loves. But Gerti is in love with the son of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman. As a result, Sanna observes, he "is a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class -- I can never get the hang of these labels." Regardless of the label, Nazi race laws make the relationship illegal and the two risk their freedom by seeing each other.
Likewise, when Sanna recalls being summoned to a Gestapo office, it appears a "place of pilgrimage. Mothers are informing on their daughters-in-law, daughters on their fathers-in-law, brothers on their sisters, sisters on their brothers, friends on their friends, drinking companions on their drinking companions, neighbours on their neighbours." There is also a less consistent stream of people looking for those who have "disappeared" but they "are not so well and kindly treated as the informers."
Then there's Sanna's older stepbrother, Algin, a highly successful novelist -- until his books were banned by the Nazis. Facing the fact that he will remain "undesirable" unless he writes a Nazi novel and even then be viewed with suspicion, he contemplates writing a long poem about Hitler. Yet as a journalist friend observes, the Nazis have made Germany "a perfect country, and a perfect country doesn't need writers."
With its descriptive yet sparse prose, After Midnight reveals the pervasive effect politics had on normal life in Nazi Germany. Sanna's narration adds touches of innocence, satire and normalcy to a tale of people who, one way or another, have become outsiders in their own country. With the mix of people Sanna knows, her thoughts and their comments, the book provides a perspective on day to day life in pre-war Germany a work of nonfiction would find it difficult to capture.
Algin's story seems to have a basis in Keun's own life. She wrote bestselling novels but once the Nazis took power the books were withdrawn from circulation. Keun, in fact, even dared to seek damages from the Gestapo for lost profits after it seized unsold copies of the novels. While she fled the country in 1936, she published several novels in Amsterdam, including After Midnight. She then returned to Germany in 1940 under an assumed name and lived there until the end of the war.
After Midnight made its first U.S. appearance in 1938. This translation, by Althea Bell, was published in the U.K. in 1985 but is now the first release in Melville House's Neversink Library, a series of "books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored." In addition to being an excellent work, After Midnight is a superb start to that series.
(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.) show less
Susanne show more "Sanna" Moder, the narrator of the slim novel, uses almost naive political impressions, the views of others and her memories in casting cast an indelible portrait of "ordinary" life at the time. In part a love story set in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1930s, even Senna's simple, ingenue-like life is affected almost daily by Nazism and politics.
Keun's book, written and first published in 1937 after she fled Germany, portrays Sanna as somewhat vacuous or at least generally ignorant of political details. To her, dresses, parties and love are the most important things in her life. When she hears speeches warning that those who impede the Nazi program will be smashed, her "heart stands still ... because how do I know I'm not one of the sort who are going to be smashed?" But she is clever. Despite admitting she admits she doesn't understand the nuances, she does know there are simply certain things you shouldn't talk about or do. Yet her observations, often unintentionally sardonic, help reveal life and society under Nazism. For example, when someone says Hitler united the whole German nation, Sanna thinks that's fine but "it's just that the people making up the whole German nation don't get on with each other."
Personal relationships certainly aren't exempt. Sanna and her girlfriend, Gerti, are interested in their love lives and the story's ultimate resolution revolves in large part around Sanna and the man she loves. But Gerti is in love with the son of a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman. As a result, Sanna observes, he "is a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class -- I can never get the hang of these labels." Regardless of the label, Nazi race laws make the relationship illegal and the two risk their freedom by seeing each other.
Likewise, when Sanna recalls being summoned to a Gestapo office, it appears a "place of pilgrimage. Mothers are informing on their daughters-in-law, daughters on their fathers-in-law, brothers on their sisters, sisters on their brothers, friends on their friends, drinking companions on their drinking companions, neighbours on their neighbours." There is also a less consistent stream of people looking for those who have "disappeared" but they "are not so well and kindly treated as the informers."
Then there's Sanna's older stepbrother, Algin, a highly successful novelist -- until his books were banned by the Nazis. Facing the fact that he will remain "undesirable" unless he writes a Nazi novel and even then be viewed with suspicion, he contemplates writing a long poem about Hitler. Yet as a journalist friend observes, the Nazis have made Germany "a perfect country, and a perfect country doesn't need writers."
With its descriptive yet sparse prose, After Midnight reveals the pervasive effect politics had on normal life in Nazi Germany. Sanna's narration adds touches of innocence, satire and normalcy to a tale of people who, one way or another, have become outsiders in their own country. With the mix of people Sanna knows, her thoughts and their comments, the book provides a perspective on day to day life in pre-war Germany a work of nonfiction would find it difficult to capture.
Algin's story seems to have a basis in Keun's own life. She wrote bestselling novels but once the Nazis took power the books were withdrawn from circulation. Keun, in fact, even dared to seek damages from the Gestapo for lost profits after it seized unsold copies of the novels. While she fled the country in 1936, she published several novels in Amsterdam, including After Midnight. She then returned to Germany in 1940 under an assumed name and lived there until the end of the war.
After Midnight made its first U.S. appearance in 1938. This translation, by Althea Bell, was published in the U.K. in 1985 but is now the first release in Melville House's Neversink Library, a series of "books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored." In addition to being an excellent work, After Midnight is a superb start to that series.
(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.) show less
Gilgi - eine von uns was Keun's first novel, the story of an independent-minded young woman who, as Keun did, works as a typist in an office in Köln and studies languages at the Berlitz School in the evenings (in her unfinished memoirs, Keun took five years off her age to match Gilgi's situation even better). She is living at home with her middle-class parents, saving up to go travelling, and knows how to have fun whilst keeping men at a safe distance. Everything is very much under control, show more until her 21st birthday, when she gets some unexpected news from her parents. Shortly afterwards, she meets a man rather different from those she's known up to now, and the firm she works for starts to get into difficulties. She has to do a lot of growing up in a very short space of time.
There are interesting parallels with Keun's second book, Das kunstseidene Mädchen: Gilgi is someone who is determined to be independent and make her own rules for life, irrespective of what society expects of her - and to a certain extent she manages it, although it's a difficult and often frightening process, whilst Doris in the later book is destroyed by the impossible expectations of what life should be that she has been given by popular culture.
Keun's writing with its blend of simple, direct (but often ironic) language, naturalistic dialogue (a lot of it in Kölsch in this book), and passages of freeform stream-of-consciousness is very individual, but obviously heavily influenced by her mentor Alfred Döblin - not quite Berlin Alexanderplatz as retold by Bridget Jones, but somewhere in that direction. Fun, but also moving, and very socially-aware. show less
There are interesting parallels with Keun's second book, Das kunstseidene Mädchen: Gilgi is someone who is determined to be independent and make her own rules for life, irrespective of what society expects of her - and to a certain extent she manages it, although it's a difficult and often frightening process, whilst Doris in the later book is destroyed by the impossible expectations of what life should be that she has been given by popular culture.
Keun's writing with its blend of simple, direct (but often ironic) language, naturalistic dialogue (a lot of it in Kölsch in this book), and passages of freeform stream-of-consciousness is very individual, but obviously heavily influenced by her mentor Alfred Döblin - not quite Berlin Alexanderplatz as retold by Bridget Jones, but somewhere in that direction. Fun, but also moving, and very socially-aware. show less
The narrative voice is very convincing. Sanna is not as naïve or artless as she seems at first. She sounds a bit like the stereotypical 'ditzy' young woman, but it's cover for her discerning observations, sometimes delivered with droll sarcasm. At one stage when she's in a bar with her friend, she starts up a prattling conversation in an effort to distract attention from Gerti's imprudent opinions that could get them both into trouble among the people wearing party badges. She'd seen for show more herself how eager some were to inform on others when she was in Cologne. So the reader is made aware that even at this stage of the Nazi regime, it's not just the obvious signs of authority such as the Blackshirts that are to be feared... there are also people among her social crowd who would report any signs of dissent.
And when she reports on the enthusiasm for Hitler's visit to her city, her thoughts show that she sees through the empty spectacle. She's very much the outsider, the one who is observing, not joining in, not unless it's necessary to avoid attracting attention. So when the Nazi anthem is sung to the accompaniment of the compulsory Nazi salute, she does it too, to avoid the wrath of the crowd. The implication is obvious: how many others were paying lip service too?
Authoritarianism is everywhere: from Gerti's friend Kurt in his SA uniform, making her sit down almost forcibly so that everyone would think she was his property. But Gerti's in love with Dieter, who's a Jew, which brings forth Sanna's private refusal to engage with labels such a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class — though she's not naïve about what Dieter really wants from Gerti even if he is polite, and nice, and young, with soft, brown, round, velvety eyes.
It's painful to read about Dieter's father's quarrels with Algin (another young friend) who objects to the Nazis. Dieter's father — who is exempt from the restrictions on Jewish business because he runs an export company — thinks that they've put the German mentality in order and saved him from the communists. In 1937 Irmgard Keun could not have known what this man's fate was to be.
But it's also painful to realise that while Sanna thinks she's very clever at seeing through propaganda which seduces others like her Aunt Adelheid, subverting the regime on the sly so that only those who agree with her know about it, achieves nothing. It turns out that her boyfriend Franz has been in Gestapo custody and the novel ends with the pair in flight because he has murdered the informer. Her abrupt coming-of-age and loss of innocence ends as it did for so many with escape rather than resistance — and, as foreshadowed early in the book, what else could we expect under the circumstances?
We are living in the time of the greatest German denunciation movement ever, you see. Everyone has to keep an eye on everyone else. Everyone’s got power over everyone else. Everyone can get everyone else locked up. There aren’t many can withstand the temptation to make use of that kind of power. (p.100)
And when she reports on the enthusiasm for Hitler's visit to her city, her thoughts show that she sees through the empty spectacle. She's very much the outsider, the one who is observing, not joining in, not unless it's necessary to avoid attracting attention. So when the Nazi anthem is sung to the accompaniment of the compulsory Nazi salute, she does it too, to avoid the wrath of the crowd. The implication is obvious: how many others were paying lip service too?
Authoritarianism is everywhere: from Gerti's friend Kurt in his SA uniform, making her sit down almost forcibly so that everyone would think she was his property. But Gerti's in love with Dieter, who's a Jew, which brings forth Sanna's private refusal to engage with labels such a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class — though she's not naïve about what Dieter really wants from Gerti even if he is polite, and nice, and young, with soft, brown, round, velvety eyes.
Dieter is what they call a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class—I can never get the hang of these labels. But anyway, Gerti’s not supposed to have anything to do with him because of the race laws. If all Gerti does is simply sit in the corner of a café with Dieter, holding hands, they can get punished severely for offending against national feeling. Still, what does a girl care about the law when she wants a man? And if a man wants a girl, it’s all the same to him if the executioner’s standing right behind him with his axe, so long as he gets one thing. Once he’s had it, of course, it is not all the same to him any more. (p.17)
It's painful to read about Dieter's father's quarrels with Algin (another young friend) who objects to the Nazis. Dieter's father — who is exempt from the restrictions on Jewish business because he runs an export company — thinks that they've put the German mentality in order and saved him from the communists. In 1937 Irmgard Keun could not have known what this man's fate was to be.
But it's also painful to realise that while Sanna thinks she's very clever at seeing through propaganda which seduces others like her Aunt Adelheid, subverting the regime on the sly so that only those who agree with her know about it, achieves nothing. It turns out that her boyfriend Franz has been in Gestapo custody and the novel ends with the pair in flight because he has murdered the informer. Her abrupt coming-of-age and loss of innocence ends as it did for so many with escape rather than resistance — and, as foreshadowed early in the book, what else could we expect under the circumstances?
My heart always stands still when I hear those speeches, because how do I know I’m not one of the sort who are going to be smashed? And the worst of it is that I just don’t understand what’s really going on. I’m only gradually getting the hang of the things you must be careful not to do. (p.63)show less
TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/04/18/after-midnight-1937-by-irmgard-keun-translat...
This was the manuscript that Keun took with her in her suitcase when she went into exile, and it's the first of her books to have been published in Amsterdam. Contrary to what you might expect in the circumstances and with that title (literally: The girl the children weren't allowed to associate with) it's not a critique of the current political situation in Germany, but a comic children's book, whose only explicit political content harks back to before 1918.
The (never-named) narrator of show more the stories is that archetype of children's fiction, the child who does everything for the best possible reasons but somehow always ends up causing unintended and very comical mayhem and getting herself into trouble. The book is set in a middle-class suburb of Köln in the years around the end of the Great War, and the narrator is about nine or ten in the first story, thirteen in the last, so roughly the same age as the author. Keun is - of course - a specialist in comic first-person narrators. The little girl's voice is entirely convincing, and she very effectively draws us into her frustration with the condition of childhood and the grown-ups' failure to appreciate her real good qualities. The inevitable escalation of the minor bits of mischief into major disasters is handled very cleverly as well. I suspect that a child reading along with an adult would be a little bit annoyed to find how many surreptitious grown-up jokes the author has buried in the text, but conversely the adult reader would be horrified at the dangerous and anti-social ideas a child might get from the book, so the two things probably cancel each other out. Anyway, I don't think a modern child would be able to track down a source of laundry blue, so we're probably safe!
I wondered at first whether Keun had set out to write a children's book in the hope of circumventing the Nazi ban on her work, but with a general theme that definitely doesn't reflect the Nazi ideal of womanhood and two explicitly anti-war chapters (in one the narrator writes a letter to the Kaiser urging him to abdicate and end the war, in the other she tries to help soldiers on leave to infect themselves with her little brother's scarlet fever germs so they won't have to return to the trenches), this obviously isn't a book that could have been published in Germany at the time. However, unlike her novels for adults, it was re-published in Germany shortly after the war, and there was even an English translation as early as 1955. show less
The (never-named) narrator of show more the stories is that archetype of children's fiction, the child who does everything for the best possible reasons but somehow always ends up causing unintended and very comical mayhem and getting herself into trouble. The book is set in a middle-class suburb of Köln in the years around the end of the Great War, and the narrator is about nine or ten in the first story, thirteen in the last, so roughly the same age as the author. Keun is - of course - a specialist in comic first-person narrators. The little girl's voice is entirely convincing, and she very effectively draws us into her frustration with the condition of childhood and the grown-ups' failure to appreciate her real good qualities. The inevitable escalation of the minor bits of mischief into major disasters is handled very cleverly as well. I suspect that a child reading along with an adult would be a little bit annoyed to find how many surreptitious grown-up jokes the author has buried in the text, but conversely the adult reader would be horrified at the dangerous and anti-social ideas a child might get from the book, so the two things probably cancel each other out. Anyway, I don't think a modern child would be able to track down a source of laundry blue, so we're probably safe!
I wondered at first whether Keun had set out to write a children's book in the hope of circumventing the Nazi ban on her work, but with a general theme that definitely doesn't reflect the Nazi ideal of womanhood and two explicitly anti-war chapters (in one the narrator writes a letter to the Kaiser urging him to abdicate and end the war, in the other she tries to help soldiers on leave to infect themselves with her little brother's scarlet fever germs so they won't have to return to the trenches), this obviously isn't a book that could have been published in Germany at the time. However, unlike her novels for adults, it was re-published in Germany shortly after the war, and there was even an English translation as early as 1955. show less
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