The Artificial Silk Girl (20 page)

I’m going to go look for Karl after all, he always wanted me — and I’ll say to him: Karl, let’s work together. I will milk your goat and stitch eyes on your little dolls, and I will get used to you with everything that’s involved — but you have to give me time and you have to leave me alone — you have to let these things take their course — and if
you don’t want to, if you don’t want to, then I’ll have to do it on my own — where should I go? But I don’t want anyone to kiss me. And I’ve had enough of the office — I don’t want to go back to what I had before, because it was no good. I don’t want to work, but I have buoys of cork in my stomach. They won’t let me go down, will they?

Dear Ernst. In my thoughts I’m giving you a blue sky, I love you. I want — want — I don’t know — I want to be with Karl. I want to do everything together with him. If he doesn’t want to — I won’t work, I’d rather go on the
Tauentzien
and become a star.

But I could just as well turn into a Hulla — and if I became a star, I might actually be a worse person than a Hulla, who was good. Perhaps glamour isn’t all that important after all.

Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905. After a stint as a stenographer in Cologne, she started training at the local drama school. Her acting career culminated in an engagement at the renowned Thalia Theater in Hamburg.

In 1931, at age 21, she published her first novel,
Gilgi, A Girl Just Like Us
, the story of a stenographer who sacrifices her professional ambitions for a passionate love affair. Her second novel,
The Artificial Silk Girl
, appeared only one year later, and instantly became a bestseller.

With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, Keun’s books were blacklisted. The author left Germany for Belgium in 1936, and later for the Netherlands, where she met fellow exiles Stefan Zweig, Ernst Toller, Hermann Kesten, and Joseph Roth. Keun published three more novels in exile. In 1940, the Nazis conquered Holland, forcing her to return to Germany, where she survived the war in hiding.

After the war, Keun continued her literary career but enjoyed only modest success, until her early novels were rediscovered and reissued in the late 1970s — in the wake of the feminist movement in Germany.

Keun refused the many invitations to document her tumultuous life in an autobiography. She died in 1982 in Cologne.