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Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was The Artificial Silk Girl. In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential "material girl" remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more. Other Press is pleased to announce the republication of The Artificial Silk Girl, elegantly translated by noted Germanist Kathie von Ankum, and with a new introduction by Harvard professor Maria Tatar.… (more)
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At the start of the book Doris works as a typist; she's poorly paid, undereducated and not particularly competent. Her father is a
When Doris loses her typing job, she becomes a stage extra and fantasises about becoming a filmstar. She steals a fur coat and runs away to Berlin. There she tries to get work in films, but is reduced once again to finding men to pay her way.
The Artifical Silk Girl has been compared to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but Doris' helplessness reminds me more of Jean Rhys' heroines, drifting from man to man in a corrupt and threatening world, and drowning their sorrows in booze . Unlike Rhys' women though, Doris is not yet defeated.
The fascination of The Artifical Silk Girl lies in its descriptions of Berlin in the late twenties. The streets are full of unemployed. Uniformed thugs take over clubs and restaurants, causing the customers to flee in fear. Racism is rife; people are already talking about getting rid of Jews.
Keun herself escaped Germany for Belgium, where she spent two years with Joseph Roth. She re-entered Germany under a false name and spent the war years there in hiding.
I thought this books was well worth reading, but have a few quibbles about the translation. Doris admires America, so I'm assuming the original book contained some American slang. Unfortunately the translator has chosen to render it in the American of today and the recent past. I doubt that Americans were calling people "losers" during the Great Depression, and they certainly hadn't heard of "Women's lib."
This may be a very funny book, and it's one you could easily shelve under "chicklit", but it's also a book with tough messages about class and gender and what happens when illusions meet hard social realities. The view of the world it transmits is definitely not one that the Nazis would have been comfortable with.