Nazi Germany has retrospectively formed the subject of many novels of varying authenticity, but there are relatively few – for obvious reasons – by contemporary German authors that capture the texture of everyday life for its civilian populace from within. Foremost among them must be Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, Vicki Baum’s Berlin Hotel, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Waiting Room trilogy – and After Midnight (Nach Mitternacht) by Irmgard Keun.
I was first tempted to read Keun’s novels through her appearance in Volker Weidermann’s Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer before the Dark, a work of non-fiction that portrays, with novelistic élan, the arguments and affairs of a group of émigré writers at the Café Flore in the Belgian seaside resort in 1936. Born in Berlin to a prosperous, liberal family in 1905, Irmgard Keun grew up in Cologne, and enjoyed considerable success with her first two novels, Gilgi (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (1932), which follow the adventures and misadventures of young women attempting to survive the wrecked economy of Weimar Germany and a succession of weak, unreliable men. ‘I do not recommend it for family reading,’ wrote the Liverpool Echo’s critic of the latter. ‘Its candour is shocking, yet it has gleams of pathetic and lyrical beauty.’
In May 1933, four months after they came to power, the Nazis burned both books along with those by Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig and many others deemed to be of ‘un-German spirit’. Keun, with astonishing chutzpah, sued the Gestapo for loss of earnings. After her suit failed and she was refused membershi
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Subscribe now or Sign inNazi Germany has retrospectively formed the subject of many novels of varying authenticity, but there are relatively few – for obvious reasons – by contemporary German authors that capture the texture of everyday life for its civilian populace from within. Foremost among them must be Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, Vicki Baum’s Berlin Hotel, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Waiting Room trilogy – and After Midnight (Nach Mitternacht) by Irmgard Keun.
I was first tempted to read Keun’s novels through her appearance in Volker Weidermann’s Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer before the Dark, a work of non-fiction that portrays, with novelistic élan, the arguments and affairs of a group of émigré writers at the Café Flore in the Belgian seaside resort in 1936. Born in Berlin to a prosperous, liberal family in 1905, Irmgard Keun grew up in Cologne, and enjoyed considerable success with her first two novels, Gilgi (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (1932), which follow the adventures and misadventures of young women attempting to survive the wrecked economy of Weimar Germany and a succession of weak, unreliable men. ‘I do not recommend it for family reading,’ wrote the Liverpool Echo’s critic of the latter. ‘Its candour is shocking, yet it has gleams of pathetic and lyrical beauty.’ In May 1933, four months after they came to power, the Nazis burned both books along with those by Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Stefan Zweig and many others deemed to be of ‘un-German spirit’. Keun, with astonishing chutzpah, sued the Gestapo for loss of earnings. After her suit failed and she was refused membership of the Reich Literary Chamber, without which no writer could earn a living, she left Germany – and her much older, pro-Nazi husband Johannes Tralow – for Belgium and the Netherlands. In Ostend she formed a relationship with a fellow exile, the great Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth, whose many novels included Job and The Radetsky March (see SF no. 41). It was both mutually supportive and mutually destructive: supportive, in that they sat at café tables writing together, and would critique and encourage one another’s work; destructive, in that they also encouraged one another’s heavy drinking. It would kill Roth, and nearly killed Keun; she spent six years in a sanatorium after the war. Keun signed a three-book contract with Roth’s publisher, the Amsterdam-based German émigré firm Allert de Lange, for whom she wrote a young adult novel with the unwieldy title Das Mädchen, mit dem die Kinder nicht verkehren durften (The Girl Children Weren’t Allowed to Mix with); its US translator, understandably, opted for The Bad Example. Hermann Kesten, the novelist and head of the German department at Allert, was impressed by her. ‘She was naïve and brilliant, funny and desperate, popular and fiery,’ he wrote later, ‘a daughter who is ashamed of her fathers and brothers, a prophetess who accuses, a preacher who scolds, a political person who saw an entire civilization disappear.’ But her fourth novel, After Midnight, proved too controversial for the firm; afraid that the book’s explicit anti-Nazi perspective would damage sales of their other titles in Germany, they turned it down. Keun took it to the rival exile press in Amsterdam, Querido. Having already published Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, the story of an actor who sells his soul to the Nazis in return for success, they were less timid, and the book appeared in 1937. Set in 1936 – the year Keun left Germany – After Midnight begins on the day Hitler comes to Frankfurt; the centre of town is blocked off by SA and SS men holding back the expectant crowds. Two ambitious mothers compete to have their child present a bouquet to the Führer. In the event, his motorcade sweeps past without stopping, leaving little Berta, selected for the role despite a fever, crestfallen. As a consolation prize, the girl is encouraged to stand on a pub table, still clutching her fading violets, and recite the sycophantic poem her father has composed for the occasion. Midway through a verse, she collapses and dies in a pool of spilt drinks. Watching, appalled, is 19-year-old Sanna, who has left Cologne for Frankfurt to escape her ghastly Aunt Adelheid, an ignorant and bigoted woman who grimly exploits the smidgeon of power granted her by the Nazis as an air-raid warden, and who has denounced her to the Gestapo for her irreverent attitude to Goering’s hectoring speeches on the radio. She moves in with her brother Algin, a formerly successful writer whose books – like Keun’s own – have been banned as demoralizing and offending ‘against the basic will for the reconstruction of the Third Reich’. Algin is now reduced to turning out hack work to sup port his high-maintenance wife Liska, who is in love with the cynical, disillusioned journalist Heini. Adelheid’s much put-upon son Franz, Sanna’s cousin, has promised to join her in Frankfurt – but where is he? Meanwhile her best friend Gerti is going out with a half-Jewish boy, Dieter . . . The novel offers a chilling glimpse of a society in which people disappear, Jews can only, uneasily, frequent certain cafés, the screams of Communists being executed can be heard from the city jail, and every conversation – even girl-talk in the ladies’ lavatory – has to be guarded in case it is overheard. Anyone – a neighbour, work col league, friend or family member – might report an ill-advised word or seditious joke to the authorities, often not out of political conviction but from the pettiest of motives: envy, spite or for material gain. On its publication, Klaus Mann hailed After Midnight as ‘the most powerful and vivid account of daily life in the Third Reich’, but Keun never labours the seriousness of her concerns. Part of her skill as a novelist consists in maintaining a light, ironic tone while hinting at the depths that lie beneath, at the same time laying bare her characters’ insecurities, foibles and flaws in a few deft strokes. Like her previous novels, After Midnight (translated in Penguin Modern Classics by the late Anthea Bell) is narrated in the first-person continuous present by its young woman protagonist, in a style that verges on stream of consciousness, with fleeting thoughts and mundane details interspersed with snatches of popular songs. Like both Gilgi and Doris in The Artificial Silk Girl, Sanna is apolitical, primarily concerned with having a good time, an uneasy amalgam of naïvety and resourcefulness. Like her predecessors, she is a skater on thin ice – but since the demise of the Weimar Republic, the ice has got a lot thinner, and the waters beneath much deeper and darker. Two more novels for Querido followed. D-Zug dritter Klasse (Third Class Express, 1938), which describes the thoughts and feelings of seven passengers fleeing Germany on the Berlin–Paris train, has yet to be translated into English. A Child of All Nations (also 1938) is told from the perspective of 10-year-old Kully, who along with her mother is dragged from one European city to another by her exiled writer father. His indigent life, continually cadging money and fleeing creditors, bears an unmistakeable resemblance to that of Joseph Roth. Unable to tolerate his possessiveness and instability any longer, Keun separated from Roth in 1938. According to Keiron Pim’s recent biography of Roth, Endless Flight (2022), she did not attend his funeral in Paris in 1939 but sent a poem, which she asked a friend to drop into his grave: ‘Sorrow, my friend, makes my throat silent,/ Where are you, friend, I must find you again.’ In August 1940, after the Nazis had invaded Holland, the Daily Telegraph reported that Keun had committed suicide in Amsterdam. Many saw no reason to disbelieve the story, among them Arthur Koestler, who included her name in a list of ‘the exiled writers of Germany who took their lives when France fell’ in the dedication of his 1941 book, Scum of the Earth. Whether she planted the story herself or simply took advantage of a mistake, we’ll probably never know, but she badgered a German official to issue her with false papers (‘she talked at him until his penis shrivelled up’, according to her daughter) and sneaked back into Germany, where she lived with her parents in Cologne, hiding in plain sight throughout the war. After the war, Keun attempted to re-establish her career, writing radio scripts and feature articles. In 1947, her anthology Pictures and Poems of Emigration was published. A book of short stories, Nur noch Frauen (Only Women Left) followed in 1949, and her final novel, Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart, in 1950. For many Germans, unwilling to confront their recent past, Keun was an unwelcome ghost, a reminder of all they wished to sweep under the carpet. ‘Her books weren’t well received after the war,’ her daughter explained in a 2011 interview for the German Book Office in New York, ‘because too many people saw themselves in them.’ Keun had no illusions about this: in November 1947 she told Heinrich Mann that Germany was suffocating under a ‘wave of bourgeois smugness . . . snivelling dishonesty and dripping self-pity’. In 1954, her collection of sketches lampooning West Germany’s post-war bourgeoisie, Wenn wir alle gut wären (If We Were All Good) appeared, and in 1955–6 she collaborated with the future Nobel laureate and fellow Colognian Heinrich Böll on an epistolary satire of Konrad Adenauer’s post-war conservative government, but this was not published until Böll’s posthumous Works appeared in 2006. Despite her defiance, the years of exile and post-war neglect – if not outright hostility – took their toll on Keun in poverty, spells of homelessness and worsening addiction. Her last book, a collection of essays called Blooming Neuroses, appeared in 1962. By 1966 she had been committed to a psychiatric clinic in Bonn for alcoholism and drug dependency, where she remained until 1972. Then, in the late 1970s, her fortunes began to improve. A new generation of feminists rediscovered her work, and the German publisher Claassen reissued her novels. Gradually they found their way into translation, bringing her both recognition and a measure of financial security. Irmgard Keun died in Cologne in May 1982 at the age of 77. She is commemorated in a sculpture on the façade of Cologne City Hall, next to that of her friend Heinrich Böll; most of her books remain in print, five are now available in Penguin translations, and her work is widely studied. Towards the end of After Midnight, as several characters contemplate flight from Germany, Heini – seemingly voicing Keun’s own experience – offers a bleak vision of exile that still resonates today:You’re a poor emigrant. You’ll find any other country is smooth and hard as a chestnut shell. You become a trial to yourself and a burden on others. For 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.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © C. J. Schüler 2026
About the contributor
C. J. Schüler is a writer and editor based in London. His travelogue Along the Amber Route: St Petersburg to Venice was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Award for travel writing.
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