hannah wickes

*dances*

News time! I am moving to Düsseldorf in Germany. Which means I really need to increase my understanding of German literature..... my knowledge is horribly and embarrassingly limited (and due to not speaking or reading Deutsche I am currently limited to translations). 

But yesterday, on the train I finished After Midnight by Irmgard Keun. And it was incredible, a satire of what life was like in Frankfurt in 1936. The narrator, Sanna is naively, and almost unknowingly critical of Nazi germany and reels off statements like this: 

“Goodness knows how often I’ve told her, “Gerti, don’t make yourself and Dieter unhappy.” Dieter is what they call a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class—I can never get the hang of these labels. But anyway, Gerti’s not supposed to have anything to do with him because of the race laws. If all Gerti does is simply sit in the corner of a café with Dieter, holding hands, they can get punished severely for offending against national feeling... And then the pair of them sit in a bar looking at each other, the air around them positively quivering with love-sickness. Everyone in the bar must notice; no good can come of it. They just live for the moment, and cause the air to quiver, and don’t stop to wonder what next. Gerti thinks the good Lord will help them, because she’s so beautiful, and the good Lord is a man.”

It is a genius book, short and sharp, and a true insight until what life was like in pre-war Germany. Keun wrote the book in exile after her books were banned and burnt. She seems to be an incredible woman, who sued the Gestapo for loss of her books and was in turn divorced by her husband for being non-conformist. 

And I just found this, an interview with Irmgard Keun’s daughter, Martina Keun-Geburtig, about what her mother was really like - and what she thought of her own work.