(no subject)

radiantfracture's post about Irmgard Keun's The Artificial Silk Girl intrigued me enough that I checked it out of the library pretty much immediately after reading it.

The book was written in Germany, 1932, and almost immediately banned when the Nazis rose to power in 1933 -- but for a year it was wildly popular, Irmgard Keun's effort at writing a Weimar German answer to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, just a witty story about a would-be-glamour girl who wants nice clothes and a nice boyfriend and ideally a nice film career in the middle of a Depression with fascism on the rise in the background.

But, you know, it was 1932. Irmgard Keun didn't know what was going to happen, and neither does Doris. There's a tension in the air, but it's background tension, thickening, and the foreground is Doris going on bad dates; Doris trying to help her friends, who've got no more money than she does; Doris landing rich men, temporarily, and being comfortable, for a while, before self-sabotaging. When Doris gets to Berlin for the first time (to escape from the police after stealing her neighbor's fur coat in a fit of temptation) she immediately gets swept up in a protest march, and in the spirit of camaraderie goes out for cake with a fellow rally-goer to try and learn about politics:

So I asked the navy-blue married man what the politicians had come here for. And in turn he told me that his wife was five years older than him. I asked why people were shouting for peace, since we have peace or at least no war. Him: "You have eyes like boysenberries." I hope he means ripe ones. And so I was beginning to become afraid of my own stupidity and asked carefully why it was that those French politicians on that balcony had moved us so much and if this means that everyone agrees, when there's so much enthusiasm, and whether there will never be another war. So the navy-blue married man tells me that he's from Northern Germany and that's why he's so introverted. But in my experience those who tell you immediately: "You know, I'm such an introvert," are anything but, and you can rest assured that they're going to tell you everything that's on their mind. And I noticed that that bell jar of fraternization was starting to lift off and float away. I made one more attempt, asking him if Frenchmen and Jews were one and the same thing, and why they were called a race and how come the nationalists didn't like them because of their blood - and whether it was risky to talk about that since this could be the beginning of my political assassination. So he tells me that he gave his mother a carpet for Christmas [...] So I said "Just a minute" and secretly disappeared through the back door. And I was sad about not having gotten any political education. But I did have three pieces of hazelnut torte - which took care of my lunch, which couldn't be said about a lesson in politics.

And, you know -- only some of the fascination here is hindsight. There's a feeling Keun captures, quite deliberately, that's deeply genuine and uncomfortably relatable. You know the world is changing around you, you know there are things that are going on that are important, but that doesn't mean you're not going to be stuck having the world's most banal conversation in a coffeeshop with a married man for whom a protest march is just a chance to pick up a girl.

As the book goes on, things get worse for Doris; she slides from being an office girl, to an aspiring actress, to someone who'd like to find a rich boyfriend but would never contemplate prostitution, to someone who might possibly contemplate prostitution. Her narration is still often bitingly funny, but the humor gets more and more mixed with desperation. Still, the ending isn't hopeless -- for Doris, at least. Some of the fascination is hindsight, but hindsight isn't everything.

Wikipedia, by the way, informs me that Irmgard Keun was deeply bitter against the Nazis for censoring her literary career, had an affair with a Jewish doctor who wanted to treat her for alcoholism, and fled to Belgium in 1936.