Irmgard Keun, Berlin writer in exile

Irmgard Keun was born in the Charlottenburg district in Berlin in 1905 of Eduard and Elsa-Charlotte Keun. She and her family live in Berlin before moving in 1913 to Cologne. In 1921 Keun attended a business school and then took shorthand and typing lessons. She then works as a stenographer. From 1925 to 1927 Irmgard Keun attended the Cologne School of Theater. Some engagements ensue, but with little success. For this reason she ended her theatrical career in 1929 and began writing, encouraged by Alfred Döblin. In 1932 she married author and director Johannes Tralow; the couple divorced in 1937.


In 1931, her first novel, Gilgi - one of us, makes Irmgard Keun famous from one day to the next. Similarly, The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932, is a commercial success. But in 1933-1934 her books were confiscated and banned by the Nazi regime.

"Many philosophers, historians, artists, composed with the Nazi regime. In contrast", writes Klaus Mann in The Turning Point, "German writers – and it is a satisfactory conclusion - showed more courage in 1933 than the members of other professions. Very quickly, a whole section of our literature went into exile." Among known representatives, even if her name is less known than others, Irmgard Keun, 30 years old in 1935, author of Gilgi and The artificial silk girl: in 1933, these two best-sellers disappeared from German libraries and bookshops. Mann: "Those who were compromised by their race were not the only ones to take off. Many, whose non-Jewish blood was irreproachable, departed too: Fritz von Unruh and Leonhard Frank, Bertolt Brecht and Oskar Maria Graf, René Schickelé and Annette Kolb, Werner Hegemann and Georg Kaiser, Erich Maria Remarque and Johannes R. Becher, Irmgard Keun and Gustav Regler, Hans Henny Jahnn and Bodo Uhse, Heinrich and Thomas Mann: to name just a few. "

Keun is only entitled to this mention in the memoirs of Klaus Mann. In 1941, she appears in another list, that of suicidal exiled writers. It is a mistake. But she lets it be said, as it allows her to return to Germany under false identity. She died in 1982, again briefly rich and famous, reissued in her country, reinstated among her peers. In 1950 she became a single mother. In the 1970s, young feminists and other admirers were interested in this seductive fallen, alcoholic and psychiatric character, living in destitution at once imposed and chosen.

For posterity, Irmgard Keun is especially associated with Joseph Roth, whose wandering existence she shared from the summer of 1936 to the end of 1937, until she escaped his suffocating jealousy. The sparkling German and the "distressed" Austrian (her expression), fifteen years older, meet in Ostend.  They work in smoky cafes, we see them fill pages and pages and emptying glasses at the same rate. "


Claire Devarrieux, in Libération, May 28, 2014

The main character of The artificial silk girl has come to Berlin from a town in the Rhineland. She meets all kinds of strange people and has trouble finding her own way in the metropole. Here, we see her in the district around the Gedächnitskirche:

"I see my own mirror image in the windows, and I think I’m pretty, and then I look at the men and they look at me, then one feels big and important. There is Gedächtniskirche with a tower gray like oystershell - I can eat oysters now, in the proper way - heaven has a kind of rose-colored gold shimmer in the fog, and it makes me feel like going to church somehow, but you cannot get there because of all the cars - a red carpet is laid out, because there was a terribly fine wedding this afternoon - Gloriapalast shines and looks great - like a castle, a castle - in fact, it is a cinema and a café. Around the church is a fence of black iron chains. And beyond is the Romanisches Café where men have so long hair! And there I spent the evenings with the cultural elite, which means a selection of the best, but every crossword-solver knows that. And we formed like a coterie the whole bundle, and the Romanisches Cafe is unrecognizable nowadays. And everyone says now: Lord, that place where all these penniless writers sit, you cannot go there anymore. And still they go there. I learned a lot, it was like teaching yourself a foreign language. And none of them has much money, but they live in any case, and some of the elite play chess instead of having money. And it takes a lot of time, that's the point of it all, but the waiters don’t see it that way, because a cup of coffee brings a tip of five pfennig and it's not much from a chess-guest who sits there for seven hours."

But NOT by Miss Keun