Features
Damned by the Nazis, Hailed by the Feminists
by Maria Tatar
Keun’s compelling rendering of Berlin in the 1920s was inspired in part by Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), a work that had created a literary sensation by turning the spotlight on convicts, prostitutes, and criminal lowlifes. Döblin met Keun at a reading in Cologne and encouraged her to write, emphasizing that her sharp powers of observation and narrative skills could lead to real literary prominence. Following Döblin’s example, along with that of Brecht, who had portrayed armies of beggars, prostitutes, and gangsters in his popular Threepenny Opera (1928), Keun turned her attention to giving a voice to those who had never had any real literary representation. While male authors had sought to ventriloquize female characters — Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else is perhaps the most notorious example — few women had engaged their literary skills to solving the problem of female representation in contemporary literature. Inspired by the example of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), Keun set out to write the German answer to the bestselling novel from the United States.
In giving us the dark underside of the glamorous “golden twenties,” Keun came to be decried as an exponent of what the Nazis called “asphalt literature with anti-German tendencies.” But what disturbed the Nazis about Keun’s Artificial Silk Girl was not merely its evocation of urban pathologies, but also its endorsement of empathy and tolerance. Looking for distraction, Doris goes to the movies with Ernest (the “Green Moss”) and sees Girls in Uniform, a film that had its world premier in Berlin in 1931. Directed by the actress Leontine Sagan, the film chronicles the events leading to the near suicide of a young woman at a German boarding school. Manuela, a newly arrived student, develops emotional and erotic feelings for one of her teachers, and is driven to the brink of suicide by the headmistress, a woman associated with militarism. The film ends on a conciliatory note, with a headmistress so shaken by the events that she is prepared to make real reforms.
Doris reacts with sympathy to Manuela’s plight, just as she empathizes with those who share her fate on the streets. “You love somebody and that brings tears to your eyes and gives you a red nose. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or a woman of God.” In this empathetic identification with a lesbian protagonist, Doris reveals herself to be, if not a shrewd social critic, then at least an exponent of open-mindedness and tolerance. It was this message about our common humanity more than the novel’s gritty realism that must have given offense to Nazi censorship boards.
In 1933, Irmgard Keun’s writings were banned. The Artificial Silk Girl was withdrawn from publication, with all remaining copies destroyed. Disturbed by the ease with which both her husband and her brother made the transition to a new political regime, Keun found herself anxious and distraught, unable to continue writing. “Do I know where I’ll be tomorrow? If it were just a matter of talent, accomplishment, hard work, then I wouldn’t be afraid. The idea of risk doesn’t bother me. I know what risk is. But how do I deal with senseless arbitrary decisions?” she wrote in a letter of 1933. In 1936, she left her husband, who encouraged her to flee with “the Negroes and the Jews” and traveled to Belgium, where she could “write, speak, and breathe once again.” In Ostende she joined a circle of exiles that included Joseph Roth, with whom she had a two-yearlong affair.
After two months in New York, Keun returned to Germany illegally under the name Charlotte Tralow. Although she resumed writing, she remained socially isolated, even after the birth of her daughter in 1951. Although she was rediscovered as a writer in the mid-1970s, she remained indifferent to media attention. She died at home in Cologne in 1982.
Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in German Studies, Folklore, and Children’s Literature, and she authored the introduction to the Other Press edition of The Artificial Silk Girl.
——————-
This article originally appeared in the June 2011 edition of the Other Press newsletter. Click here to subscribe.
