Customer Reviews

ARTIFICIAL SILK GIRL

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There is nothing fake or artificial about the heroine of this surprising work of fiction. First published in 1932 in Germany, it was followed very quickly by its English translation in 1933. It was an immediate hit for a young author's second novel; praised for its pointed sense of humour as well as the underlying critique of society. The story, written in the form of the central character's musings and diary, blends a young woman's daily struggles to make ends meet with an at times sarcastic yet always witty commentary on daily life among the working classes during the dying days of the Weimar Republic. Irmgard Keun cleverly uses her memorable character - Doris - who is as naïve as she is shrewd - to convey her own astute observations and critique of social and economic conditions of the time. While many aspects of the impending political disaster could not be predicted, Keun conveys her presentiments through Doris's experiences. Despite the less than rosy picture it draws for Doris, the story is written in a deceptively light-hearted style, using the regional and working class colloquial language of her character with some Berliner phraseology and idioms thrown in. Keun's vivid imagery and metaphors are unexpected as they are hilarious. Not having read (yet) the new English translation, I cannot comment on the way in which Keun's peculiar language, grammatical mistakes and all, is being conveyed in another language.

Running out of options to subsidize her meagre income as a less than competent typist, Doris dreams of making it big in the movies. "I want to be a shine" (Ich will ein Glanz sein) is her ambition. She has the looks for it and her choice of boyfriends is aimed at having them provide the necessary accessories for her status as a glamour girl. Options appear to open when she lands a one-line action part against stiff competition. Unfortunately she gets carried away with her brief moment of "Glanz", and walks off with a fur coat that "wants me and I want it - and now we have each other". Sensuality is prominent when Doris describes fabric, often linking it to smell, objects and the people she meets. Her closeness and loyalty to her former colleague and friend Therese is touching, relying on her as much as wanting to support her in turn. To escape being discovered with the fur coat, she leaves her mid-size town for Berlin, the centre of fashion, the arts and the movie business. Her luck goes up and down, depending on the circumstances and generosity of the current boyfriend. All the while she pines for her first and only love, Hubert. As soon as she feels settled into an almost "normal" life of some luxury with one partner, events force her to leave quietly or secretly. Yet, unflinchingly, she pursues her dream and the search for a Mister Right. Will she find him? As we follow Doris through a year's seasons, we realize that we take in much more: Keun's rich and detailed portrayal of Berlin and brilliant characterization of some of its multi-faceted people, always seen, of course, from Doris's perspective.

Not surprisingly, given Keun's topics and social critique, Keun's books were blacklisted and all available copies confiscated in 1933. No longer able to publish Keun went into exile to Holland, where she continued to enjoy great popularity among other German exile friends. When Holland was invaded in 1940 she had to flee again. Reports of her suicide enabled her to return under cover to Germany, where she survived until the end of the war. Unfortunately, Keun could not rekindle the public's interest in her writing; she died in 1982, lonely and poor. Her books were rediscovered decades later and have also benefited from recent re-translations. Read today, The Artificial Silk Girl (Das kunstseidene Mädchen) has lost nothing of its charm and relevance as a portrait of a working girl's life then (and now?). [Friederike Knabe]

This outstanding novel by Irmgard Keun is the portrait of a young German woman in search of a new life. Doris leaves her small town and goes to Berlin with a stolen fur coat on her and the idea if becoming a star in her mind. She is fascinated by the glory of the "big city," as it is shown on television and in films. Is she going to get what she expects from the city? Is she going to end up with the love of her life, who will provide her the happy life she has been waiting for?

The book also presents a lively panorama of Berlin in the last days of Weimar era through the first person-narrative of Doris, who functions like a camera and creates vivid images of the city. The reader wanders in the streets of Berlin with Doris, gets lost in a crowd of beggars, prostitutes and men selling perfumes and naked women posters in every corner of Alexander Platz. In this respect, the book is almost cinematic, and it is a great choice especially for those who are interested in the social, cultural and political conditions of Germany in the early 1930s.

One year after it was first published Keun's book was blacklisted for its "anti-German tendencies" and "obscene" narrative. This book is a critical reflection of its time, and Keun does not give credit to euphemisms in her story. So I can say that The Artificial Silk Girl is a brave narration of the story a brave young woman. Through Doris's psychological insight, Keun reflects a dark and gloomy image of Berlin in an ironic style. I very much enjoyed my adventure with Doris in her search of wealth, love, luxury and glamour in the hidden corners of the city, and to witness her self discovery while she is looking for many other things. Original narrative, great story!

I bought this book for the introduction, and because my German is rusty after 10 years of not using it. I was very impressed with this first English translation's success at capturing the mood of the original German text. Doris's spontanaeity, youth, naivite really comes through in Ankum's artful translation, and her astute observations of her Berlin does not lose its immediate, filmic narrative quality, which is crucial for a work that is informed by the film of the Weimar period and its treatment of the New Woman. I recommend it highly for students of German to read side-by-side with the original Keun text or for those interested in women's studies of the Weimar period.
Review by Jeanne Stepanova

... and give me an education -- I can do the rest with make up."

So says Doris - so writes Doris, that is, near the last page of her thick black notebook, in which she started telling her life story after "something wonderful" happened to her in the middle of a night in 1931. "And I think it will be a good thing," she wrote in her first entry, "if I write everything down, because I'm an unusual person. I don't mean a diary -- that's ridiculous for a trendy girl like me. But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it's going to become even more so." There's a huge irony in that declaration, which the reader may only detect in afterthought; the whole point of Doris, as the literary creation of her author Irmgard Keun, is that she's NOT an unusual person. She's one of a horde of 'thoroughly modern Millies' on the loose in modern materialism. If her life is "like a movie", it's because the Director has cast her in one, choosing her specifically because she projects herself in a fantasy made up from movies and advertising. She's "artificial" in the sense of "artifice" -- make up -- instead of genuine stuff. In her worst moments, she admits to herself that she's a cheap imitation of glamour, synthetic rather than real "silk". She strives to be glitzy and contrives to be ditzy, but neither glitz nor ditz gets her what she wants, which is to be both secure and unconstrained. Safety and Freedom are hard to combine for anyone, but Doris isn't really capable of either. Her life is such a mess that one can't help admiring her power of fantasy. Here's an extended quote from her notebook:

""And there is ermine and women with Parisian scents and cars and shops with nightgowns that cost more than 100 marks and theaters with velvet, and they sit in them -- and everything bows down to them, and crowns come out of their mouths when they exhale .... And they are their own entourage and turn themselves on like light bulbs. No one can get near them because of the rays they're sending out. When they sleep with a man, they breathe on pillows with genuine orchids .... and foreign diplomats admire them and kiss their manicured feet in fur slippers and don't really concentrate, but no one cares ... it's an elegant world - and then you take the train to the Riviera in a bed to go on vacation and you speak French and you have pig leather suitcases with stickers on them, and the Adlon bows down to you -- and rooms with a full bath, which are called a suite.
I want it, I want it so badly -- and only if you're unhappy do you get ahead. That's why I'm glad that I'm unhappy.""

But Doris is her own artifice. Not only is she utterly uneducated, chiefly because she's so self-preoccupied that she can't imagine the value of learning anything outside her fantasized self, but she's not a pretty as she needs be in her fantasies. That's implicit in her confessions of affairs with men; none of them are as bedazzled by her as she requires. She's nothing special (though her creator Keun gives her a fabulous gift for words), and her "movie script" is a sad picaresque. In a way, she's 'Lazarillo de Tormes' in artificial silk drag; her script is one tawdry episode after another, but you can be sure that she won't be discovered to be lost heiress in the last chapter. Another odd comparison comes to mind, with the classic German novel "Green Henry". That huge "Bildungsroman" is also the first-person narrative of a young person without gifts or talents, blundering through sorrows, learning their essence and yet making the same mistakes again and again. "The Artificial Silk Girl" is a mere chapter in scope in comparison to "Green Henry", but both are brilliantly honest tales of self-delusion.

The cover of this English translation quotes a review from the Los Angeles Times: "Damned by the Nazis, hailed by the feminists ... a truly charming window into a young woman's life in the early 1930s." That's about as disingenuous as a blurb can be! But in fact "Kunstseidene Mädchen" was written when Keun was only twenty-one years old, published in Germany in 1932, an instant bestseller, and then banned - burned! - by the surging Nazi Reich. One has to wonder why the Nazis didn't 'appreciate' the book; after all, it depicts the tragic ugliness that will befall the decadent youth who don't belong to the Hitlerjugend. They could have chosen to read it as a "cautionary" tale; instead of a quick rise to fame and glamour, Doris descends into homelessness, near prostitution, and despair, and the jazzy allure of urban sophistication turns out to be bleak and fetid.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine why "feminists" would hail such a depiction. It's certainly not a beatified image of womanhood. Doris is her own sex object. Her entire fantasy of glamour is constructed from her obsession with her own sexuality. She never forgets, not for a moment, her 'function' as an object of men's sexual neediness. When one man, Ernst, takes her in and pampers her without asserting sexual possession of her, she goes half nuts with insecurity and confusion about her self-constructed identity. The episodes of her 'script' are reminiscent of the sculpted plates of Judy Chicago, each one a v4g1n4 passively demanding to be gratified. But poor Doris lacks whatever "Eigenschaft" -- Quality -- one needs in order to be pleased.

This is an awfully great novella. I could write a review twice as long as the book itself exploring its perceptions and implications. The language is pungent and piquant, witty and winsome. Doris is as "real" as any woman in literature, and Irmgard Keun, who wrote so few books, was twice the writer Hemingway was or Fitzgerald aspired to be.

This is the kind of novel that is driven by both ecstasy and sadness. We are flung back and forth between the narrator's moods, dropping from one state to the other without warning. It is a beautiful novel, engaging, and it moves at a whirlwind pace. It is difficult to put down, the moods evoked, the emotions, the dreams, the confusion... There are some universal qualities to the story, i.e. searching for a home, the thrill of the moment, the illusions of love and lust. Take away the post WWI, pre-WW II-setting, place it in a modern context, and Doris could be the girl you just met at the bar or the club the other night, hoping against hope to put her life together amidst the distractions of the world and her heart. It is both timely and timeless.

Although the Artificial Silk Girl (das kunstseidene Mädchen) is the story of a young woman in Germany during the 1920s, I feel as though this story could have taken place today. I believe that many young readers, who are dissatisfied with the choices we are given, will feel the same way and will be sympathetic to the protagonist's plight.

Doris has become disenchanted with life. She is unwilling to accept the dichotomous life that everyone expects her to follow: either become a mother or a whore. However, as Doris discovers, there is little difference between the two. Doris wants to become a "shine" ("Glanz") and chooses to leave her life as a wage-slave, moving to Berlin and ignoring the restictive choices forced upon her.

The Artificial Silk Girl is written through the eyes of Doris as she describes this period of her life in her "Hollywood movie style." The reader travels with Doris through her physical and emotional struggles and journeys. If you are dissatisfied with the choices forced upon us, read The Artificial Silk Girl--not for its answers, but for its familiarity.

The first few pages of this book, I really struggled, trying to follow as Doris shifted from one thought to another, segueing from topic to topic with no real pause. That is why I have always had a general dislike for stream of consciousness novels.

Anyhow, I persevered and gradually found myself getting into the flow of the prose.

The story is simple enough, following Doris as she moves through a string of men and troubles in Berlin in the early 1930's. You get a great sense of time and place from her descriptions and the characters come across well too.

Anyone who is into the Bridget Jones style 'dear diary' reads will probably find this enjoyable as it is really a sort of precursor to that idea, but written more as a single stream than as dated entries in a diary.

I found it an enjoyable read, but I had wished for a slightly different ending and felt a little flat when I turned the final page. Also, the language seemed stiff at times, but I am not sure if that was the style of the piece or just a translation matter; I may read it in German later to compare. Still, an interesting glimpse at 1930's Berlin, told from an eccentric, upbeat point of view. Worth checking out.

I received this book as a free e-book ARC from NetGalley.

The 1932 German novel The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun has been likened to Bridget Jones's Diary and Sex and the City and Breakfast at Tiffany's, and its author said in her time that it was inspired by Anita Loos' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. There were passing moments when I thought of Moll Flanders and Sister Carrie, too, but The Artificial Silk Girl is her own person/book and a document of German life teetering between the disintegrating Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis, who would condemn the bestselling novel a couple of years later, burning every copy in the country.

Doris, the girl of the title, is young and certain in how to live as only the young can be self-assured. And, self-possessed. She explains that she is writing down her life because she wants to live it large, like a movie. Having lost her secretarial job in a legal firm (who needed all those commas, anyway?) in her hometown of Cologne, then having brought on misadventures with a theatrical troupe and relieved another woman of a fur coat, she heads for Berlin in search of a man to support her. She has no scruples about using her sexuality. She does not want to work in an office again, and especially she does not want to go to the trouble of becoming educated to work in an office. She works hard at being cluelessly apolitical, which gets her into some brief scrapes, like when she thinks an industrialist wants to hear that she is Jewish, and she lies and tells him she is, and no, that's not what he wants to hear.

Okay, she lies, she steals, she is anti-intellectual, she uses her body to attain material comforts, she's unapologetic and you can't help liking this girl. Unlike the pathetic prostitute who lives upstairs from her in Berlin, she's nobody's victim. Most of the comic interludes that inspire the comparison to Bridget Jones are in the early part of the book. Her own back story is grim and things don't always go well for her and people she knows, but you can't keep her down.

This edition includes a brief translator's note and a critical introduction, which are fine, though I wished they had answered some questions I had.