by Irmgard Keun
They took my nephew too, my nephew who helps me in the shop, and they kept him longer than you. He keeps quiet about it. He hangs out the swastika flag—well, you have to. We have to go along with it all, we want to live. They’re stronger than we are, you can’t do anything against them on your own. (133)
The man is an antiquarian bookseller, so that when Franz ignores his advice and kills the ex-Stormtrooper Schleimann, he symbolically disavows a conservative literary culture which survives by adopting the Nazi banner. The murder of Schleimann prompts the young couple’s flight from Germany, for which Sanna equips Franz with Algin’s suit, coat and passport (147). Thus the would-be tobacconist emigrates as a surrogate for the artistically compromised novelist, in a further emblematic rejection of the literary profession as it is practised in the Third Reich.
While Sanna is packing for the journey in her bedroom during Liska’s party, and Franz is hiding in the basement of the building, Sanna is disturbed by the sound of the doorbell:
Perhaps they’ve already come to arrest Franz. Then I can stay here, it’s not my fault, I did all I could, all I could … Oh, I am a pig, a pig! God forgive me for my sins. I love you, Franz. Everything will be all right if we love each other and keep together. Perhaps we’ll die together. (144)
Sanna’s first thought here, that she can abandon her fiancé in good conscience because she did her utmost to save him and has now been overtaken by events, closely parallels Heini’s view (which he expressed only one paragraph earlier) that he can abandon his antifascist journalism because he fought Nazism for years and Germany has now been overwhelmed by it. This means that when Sanna promptly asks God to forgive her for that first thought and vows to stand by Franz to the death, the narrative implicitly reproaches Heini for his refusal to renew the struggle against Nazism from exile, and for his decision (which he carries out only two paragraphs later) to kill himself. And the narrative makes the contrast between Sanna and Heini explicit in the closing paragraphs, when Sanna and Franz’s train crosses the border and she recalls, and resists, Heini’s bleak presentiment that:
“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.”
Franz’s arms hold me tight, his breath is a torrent of love. The train is not running on rails, it’s floating over a sea of happiness.
This seat is terribly hard and uncomfortable, but you are with me. We’ll sleep now. We shall need strength when we wake up. There are still stars shining behind the misty clouds. Please God, let there be a little sunlight tomorrow. (150)
But Sanna does not simply emigrate as a surrogate for the defeatist journalist Heini. She also expresses a cautious optimism about life in exile on behalf of the antifascist novelist Keun, and a cautious hope that After Midnight will shine a light on the darkness of the Third Reich.
We will never know if the echo of Sanna’s “God forgive me for my sins. I love you, Franz” in Keun’s own “God forgive me for my sins—but I really can write” was deliberate. But there can be no doubt that the repeated “Gott verzeih mir die Sünde” points to the ethical core and the artistic achievement of After Midnight. For Sanna’s fierce reaffirmation of her responsibility to help Franz unambiguously challenges her fellow Germans—and German authors—to defy Nazism in the ways open to them, and it presents that challenge with a power—and a subtlety—which demonstrate that Irmgard Keun really could write.
Editorial Note
All quotations from After Midnight are from the Melville House edition.
The quotations from Child of All Nations are from the Overlook Press edition, Woodstock & New York 2008, 6 and 30–31. The translation is by Michael Hofmann.
The quotation from “Pictures from Emigration” is from Keun’s Pictures and Poems from Emigration, Epoche Press, Cologne 1947, 26. The translation is my own.
The quotations from Keun’s letters to Strauss are from the originals held by the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne. The translations are my own.
The quotations from Keun’s letters to Hermann Kesten and Heinrich Mann are taken from Stefanie Arend and Ariane Martin’s Irgmard Keun 1905/2005: Deutungen und Dokumente, Aisthesis Press, Bielefeld 2005, 297 and 305. The translations are my own.
The extant correspondence initiated by Keun’s attempt to sue the Gestapo is held by the “Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR” of the Federal Archive in Lichterfelde, Berlin, in the file R58/914. The extant file on Keun which was maintained by the Reich Literary Chamber is 2100/0458/18.
Kurt Tucholsky’s review of Gilgi, One of Us was published in Die Weltbühne on February 2, 1932, and Kurt Herwath Ball’s review of The Artificial Silk Girl was published in Hammer: Blätter für deutschen Sinn in September 1932. The translations of the brief quotations from those reviews are my own.
The quotation from Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is from a collection of his essays published under the title Illuminations, William Collins Sons, Glasgow 1977, 243. The translation is by Harry Zohn.
Geoff Wilkes
University of Queensland
Brisbane, Australia
