The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun

Irmgard Keun (living dangerously, one thinks) actually attempted to sue the Gestapo for loss of income.īut Das Kunstseidene Mädchen is most successful not as a political or feminist polemic, but a cautionary tale of the dangers of following a dream. When the NSDAP came to power, books The Artificial Silk Girl became unacceptable, and were burned on massive bonfires. She herself is apolitical, but the author wasn’t. There’s hints of political events unfolding, but Doris is blind to them: she’s trying to hustle rich men and get film roles. Germany’s Weimar years (1918 to 1933) are often viewed as a kind of modern-day Flood parable: an orgy of decadence preceding disaster. The period setting is as much a character in the book as any of the people. This, ironically, makes her into her own worst enemy: a more realistic girl would have gone home long ago. It’s seldom depressing or sad: Doris has a bulldog’s tenacity, and never gets kicked down for long. The Artificial Silk Girl is a kind of Grecian tragedy – a narrative that moves on towards an inevitable unhappy conclusion, while having a bitchy, funny air that makes it readable ninety years later. “Why does New York have lots of garbage and Los Angeles have lots of actors? Because New York got to pick first.” Before coronavirus hit, Hollywood and West LA were stacked tens of thousands deep with aspiring actors, bussing tables and mowing lawns and firing out headshots like despairing messages in bottles.

You need to be focused, hard-working, very, very lucky, and at the end of the day you either have “it” or you don’t.

Keun writes a character who is stupid and smart at the same time: given to psychological monologues worthy of a tenured psychiatrist while completely unaware of how and when she’s being manipulated by others – men, institutions, and society.

All she has is the fur coat, reminding her of the possibility of dreams. She’s following her dreams, but they’re leading her backwards: like a riptide where swimming harder means drowning faster. Her plans fail, and she ends up increasingly far from the high life, working as a maid, a pickpocket, and eventually a “girlfriend experience” (to use a modern euphemism). And people have a great deal of respect for me because I’m glamorous.” With a white car and bubble bath that smells of perfume, and everything just like in Paris. Wearing a stolen fur coat, she journeys to Berlin, intending to make it big as a Glanz – a film star. Too bad that’s only half the sentence, and the second half is “off from work”. In this 1933 novel, a young woman called Doris gets laid.

The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun