The Mainzer Landstrasse is closed off at five o'clock in the afternoon.

At eight o'clock in the evening the Führer, who had previously given a speech in the festival hall, will drive through here on the way to the opera house.

There is a dense crowd, people with swastika flags everywhere, a confusion of excited preparations.

It is March 16, 1936, and Susanne, the young narrator who is describing these scenes, actually just wants to go home.

To do this, however, she would have to cross the street, which now seems impossible for hours.

That is why she becomes – rather involuntarily – a witness and close observer of Hitler's performance that evening in Frankfurt.

Catherine Deschka

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The way Irmgard Keun captures the atmosphere of that time in her novel “After Midnight”, published in 1937 by the Amsterdam exile publisher Querido, how she describes the march of the National Socialists with sharp humour, bitter reflections and puns, that is very precise, sometimes hidden criticism, says Christian Setzepfandt .

For the reading festival "Frankfurt reads a book", the historian and city guide has put together a tour that leads to the locations of the novel and places where Irmgard Keun was traveling in Frankfurt.

Where the Gestapo had their quarters

The writer, who was born in Berlin in 1905, only lived in Frankfurt for a few months, from November 1935 to the end of April 1936, until she fled into exile in Ostend.

Keun, who grew up in Cologne, came to the Main because of her husband Johannes Tralow, who worked as a director at the New Theater on Mainzer Landstrasse.

Setepfandt discovered that Tralow had staged ten productions in Frankfurt when he trawled through the old programmes.

The proximity to the theater was also the reason why Keun and Tralow lived in the West End.

There they looked at a house opposite with magnolias in the garden, in which the Gestapo later had their quarters.

An ugly punch line, because Keun wasn't allowed to write, her successful books like "Das Kunstseidene Mädchen" had been on the "black list" of the National Socialists since 1933.

Setepfandt uses historical photographs and postcards to evoke the attitude towards life of yesteryear.

A photo shows the terrace of the Café Esplanade with a view of the opera house.

It's easy to imagine Susanne and her friend Gerti sitting here.

It's a café, so it says in the novel, where almost only Jews frequent.

While the young women are still waiting here because their way home is blocked, the café empties.

Speeches about the Führer and the enthusiastic crowd are already raging out of the loudspeaker.

A waiter finally asks the girlfriends out onto a balcony so that they can "see everything".

How Irmgard Keun describes the appearance of the leader as "Prince Carnival in the carnival procession" from the point of view of the only apparently naive Susanne, that is high satire.

The author, who died in 1982 at a time when she had just been rediscovered because she had not been able to build on her success in the Weimar Republic after the Second World War, now rediscovering this courageous author, invites almost 90 Events of the reading festival, which lasts until May 15th, include the informative and entertaining tour with Christian Setzepfandt on April 28th.

Guided tours until June 17th.

Information at frankfurter-stadtevents.de and frankfurt-liest-ein-buch.de.