Girls with attitude

Four novels by Irmgard Keun: Gilgi, One of Us (translated by Geoff Wilkes); The Artificial Silk Girl (translated by Kathie von Ankum); Child of All Nations (translated by Michael Hofmann); After Midnight (translated by Anthea Bell) Penguin Modern Classic

chicks from the high cliffs, and netting newly fledged fulmars from the sea.

The Land of Maybe is Ecott’s crystalline, powerful, moving and highly readable account of his love affair with the Faroes. (The Faroese word for ‘maybe’ is the best-used word in the islands: it’s usually a reference to the weather, but is also a nod to the supreme fact of acknowledged contingency.) The affair is an uneasy one. Ecott doesn’t want to get too close to his beloved for fear of seeing something that will make him hate her.

What he’s worried about is killing. The Faroese don’t kill wildlife casually, but they do it unsentimentally. He killed a gannet chick himself. ‘Afterwards I am unsettled,’ he writes. ‘On one level it seems a minor thing, but holding the warm, elegant creature in my hand had plunged me into a confrontation with hunting and death that was new and disconcerting.’

His real worry is about the grindadráp – the notorious round-up and slaughter of pilot whales. ‘One day soon, you will kill a whale,’ a Faroese friend tells him, and he lives in dread of the prophecy’s being fulfilled. He’s 90 miles away when he gets the phone message. The whales have arrived. He feels compelled to go, but ‘half-hopes’ the road will be blocked.

His concerns are not ecological (pilot whales are not endangered) but (on one level) humanitarian. He’s read too much about the whales’ cognition and family lives. But mainly he’s worried about himself. I can’t blame him. He doesn’t want to lose his remaining innocence – for if that went, what might come in its place? ‘I know that if I took part in killing a pilot whale, I would be allowing the possibility of death, of nothingness and nihilism into my heart – there would be nothing sacred left in the world, and the eight-year-old boy who cried when he killed a toad would be gone for ever.’

Would it really be a loss of innocence? If the Faroese have more of a pristine, Edenic culture than ours, he might gain innocence by sticking a lance into a whale’s head. Perhaps the Faroese, chatting companionably at the beach as the blood fills the bay, are the unfallen ones. Perhaps our urban fastidiousness is a sign that we’re dangerously far from the wild world of which we are a part.

Ecott’s fine book is, at root, a timely meditation on the clash between modernity and premodernity and between settler and nomad. It’s an interrogation of the role of compassion in our moral lives and an examination of the crucial question of what sort of creatures we are. Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905 and raised in Cologne, where her father worked in the petrol industry. After school, she tried, and failed, to pursue a career in the theatre. She was in her twenties when she discovered that she had a natural talent for writing.

Her first novel, Gilgi, One of Us, was published in 1931 to instant acclaim and made into a film in 1932, when her second book, The Artificial Silk Girl, appeared. In the meantime, she married the much older Johannes Tralow, an early convert to the Nazi party, whose likeness would later grace a ten-pfennig postage stamp.

Then, in 1933, with the rise of Hitler, the two novels that had brought her success were banned. She was considered frivolous and disrespectful of German family values. Her independent, free-spirited young girl characters were judged to be a travesty of womanhood. Gilgi (short for Gisela) and Doris, wearing artificial silk, were a disgrace to the Fatherland.

Yet she continued to write throughout that ‘low, dishonest decade’, as Auden described the 1930s. Her divorce from Tralow was traumatising. In 1936 she went into exile, living for two hectic, nomadic years with the great Joseph Roth, who was sick and dying. Her books were now being published abroad, in Holland chiefly.

Two of them are still unavailable in English, but the other two from that period, After Midnight (1937) and Child

of All Nations (1938), now complete a beguiling quartet. Gilgi and Doris are joined by Susanne, known as Sanna, and Kully, an unusually sharp-eyed nineyear-old. They make you laugh and they make you think. Even while they are informing everyone that they have no knowledge of politics, they display a keen awareness of individual human behaviour – that of men, in particular.

In her translator’s note to the US edition of The Artificial Silk Girl, Kathie von Ankum calls the first-person narrator, Doris, a predecessor of Bridget Jones and the other bestselling ‘material girls’ of recent fiction. There’s a certain truth in that, though I’m not entirely sure that the likes of Helen Fielding and her copycat inferiors could ever be as shrewd or perceptive as Keun manages to be in the face of oncoming tyranny.

In the opening pages of After Midnight, for instance, the irreverent and resourceful Sanna is annoyed with Hitler and his motorcade for disrupting the quiet streets of Frankfurt when all she wants is to drink her beer and enjoy the sunshine.

In that same novel, a disillusioned former journalist named Heini cadges drinks off rich and poor alike, and then chastises his benefactors for supporting, even with silence, an ideology of racial purity as absurd as it is terrifying. They listen to him when they are not advising him to watch what he’s saying.

Sanna is Heini’s recording angel, as she is for everyone she encounters. She doesn’t miss a trick, in more than one sense. Her love for the unambitious, kind-hearted Franz – in thrall to his overpowering, Hitler-worshipping Aunt Adelheid – is the true indication of Sanna’s essential seriousness of purpose.

Each one of these four extraordinary novels, now rescued for posterity, contains scenes and characters that refuse to be forgotten. The thoughtful, diligent Gilgi, who is learning three languages and taking on extra jobs to keep herself independent, allows herself to be infatuated with an older man who, for all his charm, is amoral. She is brought to her senses by a series of unexpected events that end in the bleakest possible manner.

The resourceful Doris, who would have got Harvey Weinstein’s number within minutes of meeting him, spends happy weeks in the unlikely company of Ernst, an intellectual businessman who talks longingly of the wife who has left him. The good-time girl, irritated by Ernst at the outset, decides to care for him domestically, exhibiting skills for cooking and housework the other men she has met would be startled to know she had. This sequence in The Artificial Silk Girl is exquisitely subtle and funny.

Irmgard Keun’s last novel, The Man with the Kind Heart, set in bomb-scarred Cologne, where she lived throughout the war under the name Charlotte Tralow after the death of Irmgard Keun had been reported in an English newspaper, will be published by Penguin in December. The translator is Michael Hofmann. Keun lived for another 32 years after its appearance in 1950, raising her daughter and writing occasional articles and sketches.

When her books were reissued in the 1970s, she did nothing to promote them. Perhaps she realised they were good enough to do without her assistance.