Irmgard Keun was born in 1905 into a wealthy, middle-class family in Charlottenburg, which at that time was not yet part of the larger city of Berlin.

In 1913 the family moved to Cologne because the father became a partner in a refinery there.

After graduating from a girls' lyceum, she first worked as a shorthand typist;

she actually wants to be an actress, which doesn't go well, and turns to writing.

In 1931 she returned to Berlin to try her luck in the metropolis - like the heroine of her first novel "Gilgi, eine von uns", which brought Keun a surprise success in the same year as a completely unknown author.

Rose Maria Gropp

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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It was then in the 1970s that Irmgard Keun's two early novels, Gilgi and Das Kunstseidene Mädchen from 1932, were almost euphorically rediscovered. The fact that from then on they were studied in German seminars at universities was due not least to the new feminism, as was the renewed interest in the works of Marieluise Fleißer. At that time, Keun had a rocky path in life, which had also led her to a psychiatric clinic from 1966 to 1972, mainly because of her alcohol addiction as a young woman; after that she lived in Cologne again until her death in 1982.

With the rise of the National Socialists, the problems that threatened her existence began and her books were banned.

She was not Jewish, but her publications displeased the brown regime, which she courageously opposed;

her application for admission to the Reichsschrifttumskammer was rejected.

Keun fled to Ostend in Belgium in 1936, where she was taken in by a circle of exiles that included Hermann Kesten, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, who became her lover.

She survived the war in hiding in Germany, with a forged passport and protected by a false report in the press about her alleged death.

After that she could no longer keep her footing and could hardly continue with old connections, her other books went almost unnoticed.

As an ideal of the 1920s

With her protagonists Gilgi and Doris, the "artificial silk girl", Irmgard Keun created two representatives of the much-vaunted new woman, as they had designed the ideal of the 1920s. Time and again reference has been made to their modernity, their self-confidence. However, that is only half the truth. Because this assessment ignores the hard private and professional defeats in the struggle for independence, social recognition and social advancement. Both Gilgi and Doris are brutally thwarted in their illusions and fail because of their ideas of happiness. As figures of identification, they have often been broken. In the volume of essays “Die Froste der Freiheit”, published in 1980, which includes a quotation from Marieluise Fleißer,Gisela von Wysocki wrote about the double facet of that emancipation: "Because the liberation of women to become female employees, which is now being prepared, gives life a rather poor, above all functional shape." That is the other side of the attempt to break away from the To free oneself from dependence on men, to find one's desired social place on one's own.

Irmgard Keun, at the time only a little older than her protagonists - she made herself five years younger, the longest time 1910 was considered the year of her birth - found a strong language for this.

It is her bold, cool style that characterizes her as an author that provides the high appeal in the early books.

Towards the end of the Weimar period, this ranks them among the “asphalt literati” – initially a denunciatory term used by the National Socialists – alongside Alfred Döblin and Erich Kästner.

With two volumes, which Michael Bienert is now dedicating to Irmgard Keun, he has tracked down precisely this vulnerability and brokenness, but also rebelliousness, and made it tangible.

He follows Keun with understanding and evident affection, but by no means uncritically.