by Irmgard Keun
Keun completed four books during her years of exile, and they were published in Amsterdam. The first was Grown-Ups Don’t Understand (1936), a collection of stories in which a young girl (she is about nine in the first tale, and thirteen in the last) narrates her misadventures at school and at home. Keun had begun these stories while still in Germany, and they lacked the contemporary social resonance of Gilgi, One of Us and The Artificial Silk Girl. Grown-Ups Don’t Understand was followed by After Midnight (which I discuss in detail below) in 1937, and by both Express Train Third Class and Child of All Nations the next year. Express Train Third Class, which tells the stories of six passengers travelling on a Berlin-Paris express in June 1937, has received comparatively little attention from scholars, probably because none of the six stories reaches a definite conclusion; one character even stays on the train when it reaches Paris in the last paragraphs of the novel, and is literally shunted off. However, I have argued elsewhere that this inconclusiveness is a deliberate expression of the fear which Keun recalled in “Pictures From Emigration” that the material and psychological pressures of exile could prevent her ever writing a book again. She overcame this fear in Child of All Nations by discussing literary exile itself, again employing a child-narrator in the person of Kully, whose father “left Germany when [he] couldn’t stand it any more, because he writes books and articles for newspapers.” Kully’s unsophisticated perspective highlights the inhumane logic of the exile existence, for example when she says that:
A passport is a little booklet with stamps in. Basically, it’s to prove that you’re alive. If you lose your passport, then as far as the whole world is concerned you might as well have died. You’re not allowed to go to any more countries. You have to leave the country you’re in, but you’re not allowed to enter a different one. […] I now secretly pray every night that in future people might be able to float in the water for years on end, or fly around in the air.
Child of All Nations was Keun’s sixth book since her debut seven years earlier, but it also proved to be her last book for another nine years. She was in the Netherlands when the Second World War began in September 1939 and—like many other anti-Nazi exiles in western Europe—could find no way of leaving. After the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Keun took the extraordinary step of returning to Nazi Germany, and lived there with her parents until the end of the war. She later gave varying accounts of how she contrived to do this, but it seems that she persuaded a German army officer to secure her a passport in the name of Charlotte Tralow (Charlotte was her middle name, and Tralow was of course her former married name), and that she entered and lived in Germany under that identity. She was probably assisted in these manoeuvres by a report in the British Daily Telegraph in August 1940 that “Fräulein Irmgard Keun, the novelist, is stated to have taken her life at Amsterdam,” and by the Hungarian antifascist activist Arthur Koestler’s dedication of his 1941 book about life as an enemy alien in France, Scum of the Earth, to “the memory of my colleagues, the exiled writers of Germany who took their lives when France fell: Walter Benjamin, Carl Einstein, Walter Hasenclever, Irmgard Keun, Otto Pohl, Ernst Weiss.” It is not known whether Keun initiated the story of her suicide, or whether it arose from others’ inadvertent or deliberate misreporting.
After the Second World War Keun lived with her parents in their bomb-damaged home in Cologne. Her first postwar publication was Pictures and Poems From Emigration (1947), which included the memoir I described above. She also wrote for the Northwest German Radio Network, having particular success with a series of satirical sketches featuring a middle-aged married couple called Wolfgang and Agathe. The four sketches which have survived in their printed form have titles such as “Germans, Speak German German” and “Erna Has an Englishman,” and show Wolfgang and Agathe vehemently justifying their conformism during the Nazi years, and carefully conforming to what they believe are the wishes of the Allied military government. Keun expressed her dissatisfaction with what she saw as postwar German hypocrisy and opportunism more bluntly in letters to her former colleagues in exile, for example when she told Heinrich Mann on November 23, 1947 that all of Germany was suffering under “a pestilential wave of bourgeois smugness, smelly neo-religiosity, bovine earnestness, snivelling dishonesty and dripping self-pity.” She was especially scathing about authors who had remained in Germany during the Nazi years and offered themselves as custodians of democratic renewal after the war, as when she wrote to Hermann Kesten on August 23, 1947:
Here they’re now industriously engaged in setting up a German [PEN] group. […] Incidentally, my onetime husband, Tralow, has placed himself at the head of this movement. And he divorced me because of my “treasonable behaviour,” to make a good impression on the Reich Literary Chamber. […] Everyone has such a fortunately constructed memory. […] But I can see the day coming when Tralow and Frank Thiess and Hans Friedrich Blunck travel to represent PEN in New York, and I’m not even allowed to stroke the airplane they rush off in, because first I have to be denazified by Winifred Wagner.
Keun also attempted to re-establish her correspondence with Arnold Strauss, which of course had lapsed with her return to Germany in 1940, but Strauss responded to her handful of postwar letters only by sending a food parcel.
In 1950 Keun published Ferdinand, the Man with the Friendly Heart, in which the amiable returned soldier Ferdinand Timpe describes how he attempts to reintegrate into civilian life in Germany, only to fail in a series of increasingly inappropriate and bizarre jobs. Ferdinand’s rambling narrative has routinely been characterized as sad evidence of Keun’s declining artistic powers, but I have argued elsewhere that Keun uses the various phases of Ferdinand’s life after 1933 to conduct a frank examination of her own decisions firstly to remain in Nazi Germany, then to leave it, and finally to return. The novel also continues Keun’s attack on those she perceived as Nazi collaborators who subsequently styled themselves as democrats, most notably in Ferdinand’s farcical account of a new club called “The Society of Those Lauded Alive,” whose members treat each other to extravagant eulogies during mock funerals, heaping praise on each other as they symbolically bury their past and stake their claim to a new and uncompromised life.
Ferdinand, the Man with the Friendly Heart was Keun’s last major work, though she lived until the early 1980s. In 1955–56 she collaborated with fellow Cologne author and future Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll on a satire about the conservative government of West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, adopting the form and style of letters exchanged by two nineteenth-century intellectuals, but this was not published until it was collected in Böll’s 27-volume Works in 2006. In the 1950s and 1960s Keun also released two collections of short pieces, some of which she had originally written for the Ford Revue, a magazine sponsored by the German arm of the Ford motor company. In the later years of her life Keun underwent extensive medical treatment for alcohol and drug abuse.
While Keun’s earlier and more substantial work was never entirely forgotten in the thirty years after the Second World War, she did not attract significant attention from the media, the reading public or literary scholars until the late 1970s, when there was a revival of popular and specialist interest in writing by anti-Nazi exiles, and in writing by women. Unlike many other female exile authors such as Erika Mann or Gina Kaus, Keun lived to enjoy her belated return to literary fame, giving interviews to journalists, and public readings of her work. She also announced that she was working on her autobiography, though no trace of this was found when she died in 1982. She was survived by her daughter Martina, who was born in 1951; with her characteristic non-conformism, Keun never stated publicly who Martina’s father was.
“GOD FORGIVE ME FOR MY SINS”:
IRMGARD KEUN’S AFTER MIDNIGHT
The insecurity of life as an anti-Nazi exile author was reflected in the prepublication history of After Midnight. Allert de Lange, the Amsterdam publishing house with which Keun had signed a three-book contract befo
re leaving Germany, and which had issued Grown-Ups Don’t Understand, rejected After Midnight in November 1936 before the manuscript was even finished, fearing that the novel would damage the firm’s remaining commercial interests in Germany. However, Keun was able to place After Midnight with another Amsterdam publisher, Querido (which subsequently issued Express Train Third Class and Child of All Nations as well), and to complete the manuscript early in 1937. Her relief at this outcome probably influenced the letter of February 25, 1937 in which she informed Strauss that he would shortly receive a copy of the book, and added: “God forgive me for my sins—but I really can write.” And Keun’s enthusiasm for After Midnight was entirely justified. The novel is remarkable for its simultaneously subtle and uncompromising analysis of Nazism in general, and of writers’ responses to the Third Reich in particular.
The chief instrument of Keun’s anti-Nazi satire is of course her narrator, Sanna. The unsophisticated nineteen-year-old unconsciously subverts fascist ideology and rhetoric by the way in which she accepts them, for example when she shows the absurdity of Nazi racialism by remarking that Dieter Aaron “is what they call a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class—I can never get the hang of these labels” (17), or when she punctures the myth that “the Führer had united the whole German nation” by agreeing that this “is true enough, it’s just that the people making up the whole German nation don’t get on with each other” (33). Keun sometimes combines Sanna’s artless comments about life in the Third Reich into an ironic tour de force, most obviously in the account of the Nazi leaders’ visit to Frankfurt—an account which evidently reflects Keun’s own experiences, given that she lived in Frankfurt for some months in 1935 and 1936, and reported from there to Strauss on May 19, 1935 that there was “huge excitement in Frankfurt today: the Führer is here. All over town, the speeches are raging from the radios.” Surveying the frenzied preparations for the leaders’ arrival, Sanna notes that “still nothing happened” (25); then seeing the “[m]en who were currently famous” arrayed on the balcony of the opera house, she relays her friend Gerti’s opinion that “you didn’t get much fun out of looking at these eminent men, the eminent men must get far more fun out of having all of us looking at them” (27); and observing Hermann Göring’s showy uniform, she ponders how “the Führer […] devotes almost his entire life to being photographed for his people,” with the same kind of dedication to his public image as she once saw described “in an article about Marlene Dietrich” (28). In thus debunking the empty bombast of Nazi public spectacle, Keun provides a literary parallel to Walter Benjamin’s famous dictum in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the seminal essay which he published the year before After Midnight, that “[t]he logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.”
Sanna’s perspective is complemented by that of the journalist Heini, who analyzes the Third Reich intellectually and criticizes it deliberately. Like Sanna, Heini reveals the irrationality and falsity of Nazi ideology and rhetoric, but his comments have a mordant intensity, as when he tells his Jewish friend Breslauer that “the race laws” are “[v]ery humane indeed” (“Just imagine if Jews were legally compelled to sleep with National Socialist Women’s Club members three times a week”; 83), or when he argues that Hitler has awakened the “noblest instincts of the German nation”:
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. (100)
And Keun sometimes weaves Heini’s words, like Sanna’s, into a sustained assault on Nazism, for example when he anatomizes “the whole nefarious gang” (120) of guests at Sanna’s sister-in-law Liska’s party, attacking the regime for making outcasts of some guests (such as Breslauer, who “had his nose broken during the boycott in nineteen-thirty-three, and was later robbed of his honestly acquired means of livelihood”; 125), and reprehending the willingness to compromise with the regime which is demonstrated by other guests (such as Frau Aaron, who describes her decision to marry her Jewish husband as “an unfortunate lapse”; 123).
At this point in Liska’s party, and at other points in the narrative, the young and naïve Sanna recedes into the background as she reports what the mature and sophisticated Heini is saying. However, this is no reason to regard Sanna as a lesser character. For when After Midnight examines writers’ responses to the Third Reich—obviously a crucial issue both in German literature and in Keun’s life at the time she was writing the novel—the unlettered Sanna paradoxically emerges as a more substantial figure than the journalist Heini, and than her novelist half-brother Algin.
Algin begins by accommodating himself to Nazi cultural policy, and thereby perverting his talent, first admitting that “the stuff he’s writing these days is stupid” (94), then “coming to think it’s not so stupid after all” (94), and later wondering whether he should write “a long poem about the Führer” (97). Sanna subsequently reports that Algin has decided to reassert his intellectual integrity by embarking on a literal and figurative inner emigration as a kind of modern-day troubador—
So Algin is planning to […] walk off into the Taunus, along the Mosel, going he doesn’t mind where. […] He hopes, even in Germany, he can earn enough as a writer and poet to sleep at an inn, eat bread and drink a glass of wine in the evening, without prostituting himself too much (119)
—but he abandons this resolve at his last appearance in the novel, partly because he is disoriented by Heini’s death (which I discuss below). Algin’s probable fate is foreshadowed in that of the sickly five-year-old Berta Silias, who collapses and dies after endlessly repeating the vacuous doggerel which her ambitious father wrote for her to recite while presenting a bouquet to Hitler during the Nazi leaders’ visit to Frankfurt:
A little German maid you see.
A German mother I shall be,
My Führer, and I bring to thee
The fairest flowers of Germany […] (41)
Herr Silias’s “poem about the Führer,” which kills his daughter, suggests that if Algin continues to write as the regime wishes he will debase himself artistically, and commit literary suicide.
As Heini’s repeated comments of course indicate, he refuses to compromise with Nazism. This makes it almost impossible for him to keep writing in Germany, as Sanna notes: “Heini […] used to be a well-known journalist. He hardly writes at all these days—for political reasons” (75–76). And at Liska’s party, Heini recoils from the prospect of continuing his career outside Germany:
I’ve spent over ten years writing my fingers to the bone, racking my brains, to warn people of the madness of the barbarism ahead. A mouse squeaking to hold back an avalanche. Well, the avalanche has come down, burying the lot of us. And the mouse has squeaked its last. I am old and ridiculous: no power or desire to begin all over again. […] There are plenty of others to say the rest of what I would have said for me. […] You’ll find any other country is smooth and hard as a chestnut shell. You become a trial to yourself and a burden on others. For the roofs that you see are not built for you. The bread that you smell is not baked for you. And the language that you hear is not spoken for you. (142–43)
Moments later, Heini kills himself, apologizing “if I’m disturbing the party a little” (146) before he shoots himself in the head. Heini’s penetrating analysis of the Nazi regime’s iniquities, his haunting expression of despair at the regime’s victory, and his dramatic removal of himself from the regime’s control contrast starkly with Algin’s protracted campaign to secure the regime’s approval, and through them Keun creates a powerful figure of a writer who vigorously rejects fascism.
Nevertheless, After Midnight expresses its key judgments about authors’ responses to the Third Reich through Sanna, most notably through her relationship with her fi
ancé Franz. Sanna and Franz are obviously important in purely human terms, as the only significant characters in the novel who do not allow their emotions to be corrupted by Hitler’s Germany, with Sanna remarking artlessly but affectingly at one point that “[i]t was only when I loved Franz I understood the world, and felt happy” (104). But the subplot which culminates in the young couple’s emigration also subtly evokes the issue of writing under Nazism in general, and subtly evaluates Algin’s and Heini’s decisions is particular. That subplot begins with Sanna and Franz’s plan to open a tobacconist’s store, which they hope will expand to include “newspapers and magazines and […] a little lending library” (61), and which their partner Paul hopes will sell “books and journals containing politically undesirable material” (128). After Franz and Paul are denounced on spurious political grounds by a commercial rival called Schleimann, and Paul is killed in custody, Franz is counselled by another storekeeper against fighting the Nazi system:
