A final novel, Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart, was published in Germany in 1950 but has only recently been translated into English by Michael Hofmann in 2021.įerdinand differs from Keun’s earlier novels by virtue of its focus on a male character.

After Midnight (1937) and Child of All Nations (1938) were written while Keun was in exile abroad, with the writer finally returning to Germany in 1940 under an assumed name – possibly helped by a false newspaper report of her suicide. By 1936, Keun was travelling around Europe in the company of her lover, the Jewish writer Joseph Roth. Having enjoyed great success with her first two novels Gilgi, One of Us (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (both of which I adored), she found herself blacklisted when the Nazis swept to power in 1933. The German writer Irmgard Keun lived a fascinating life. To her sense of humour despite all, cheers!

Possibly, her clear vision of the entire disaster grated on the nerves of those with comfortable, selective memories. She was a free spirit in the early 1930s, a refugee writer later during that decade, a dissident hiding inside the collapsing country during the war, and she lived in the debris from a damaged house without a proper roof afterwards. She is one of the few German writers of the time that can relate to all the different phases of catastrophe. Unfortunately, rebuilding Germany was no joking matter, so Irmgard Keun lost her readers because she kept her sharp eye and her irony when others 'denazified' in the most ridiculously shallow way. The flags and slogans and rituals change, but people stay the same. The characters in post-war Köln are very similar to those depicted in earlier novels, in Das kunstseidene Mädchen from the Weimar Republic or Nach Mitternacht during the early years of the Third Reich or Kind aller Länder from the years of exile. Shallow, greedy, prejudiced and silly, they go about their businesses and bully those who struggle to adapt due to a lack of dishonesty and an abundance of empathy. They change their views and ideas like chameleons - on the surface, staying exactly the same inside. The former Nazis celebrate their denazification like they celebrated Hitler's birthday before. There is something deeply disturbing about the period directly after the Second World War in the destroyed German cities and minds!Īnd Irmgard Keun, via her narrator Ferdinand, has no mercy.

The book ferdinand