Gilgi, One of Us

Irmgard Keun

Penguin Modern Classics, £8.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

Irmgard Keun (1905-1982) published her first novel Gilgi, One of Us in 1931. All at once it heralded a bold new voice in German fiction. Here was a work which finally and winningly articulated the hopes and fears, life and loves of the Modern Young Woman. The book was a runaway success, spawning a film adaptation and launching Keun’s career.

That career could have been glittering. Instead, the Nazis came to power, branded the frank confessions and single-minded agendas of Keun’s heroines “immoral”, and burned her books. Keun left Germany and travelled from one European country to another with fellow author and exile Joseph Roth. She continued to publish both during the war and after it but eventually she slipped out of sight and her books went out of print.

In the late 1970s Keun was rediscovered by a younger generation of German readers. The Anglophone world was slower to respond: Penguin published Keun’s 1938 novel Child of All Nations in their Modern Classics range just 11 years ago. But posthumous reappraisal is better than none at all, and the book’s positive reception led to Penguin opening up the vaults and making more of Keun’s back catalogue available. Now we have that debut which transformed her fortunes. For those who have yet to sample the work of this wonderful writer, Gilgi, One of Us makes for the perfect entry-point.

The book is set in Cologne, where Keun grew up, and revolves around a woman who knows exactly what she wants. Gilgi is a typist at a hosiery and lingerie firm but she has “prospects”. In her free time she learns English, French and Spanish with a view to travelling. She has a talent for designing clothes and sees herself opening a fashion studio one day in Berlin or Paris. She lives at home but also has a room of her own – private space, personally paid for, in which to be alone and work in peace.

Gilgi is adept at dealing with small disturbances which impinge on her ordered life – her boss’s amorous advances, her friend Pit’s home truths, her ghastly relatives’ unwelcome visit – but two larger and wholly unanticipated dramas threaten her stability. On the morning of Gilgi’s 21st birthday, the woman she thought was her mother informs her that she isn’t. Then Gilgi falls hopelessly in love with Martin, who is older and more experienced than her but, as a writer living beyond his means, is also far less responsible. Leaving a home she no longer belongs in for a man she desires to be with, Gilgi abandons all self-control and allows herself to be steered by new currents. But soon she is dangerously out of her depth, unsure of what she is doing and where she is heading.

This is a gem of novel, a bittersweet delight which captivates the reader in many different ways. Keun brilliantly conveys both the decadence and the despair of late-era Weimar Germany, crafting scenes which play out in glitzy or tawdry nightspots, and presenting individuals ground down by unemployment and hyperinflation.

Refreshingly, the book places women centre-stage. “Haven’t you noticed, too, Gilgi,” says one, “that we’re living at a time when there’s more true solidarity among women than among men? That makes us superior.” We marvel at Keun’s thumbnail sketches of bit-parters (“morose hookers...if they weren’t wearing make-up and using belladonna you could take them for unemployed telephone operators”) and her portraits of main players, from Gilgi’s beautiful friend and “marzipan girl” Olga to the “little magazine-lady” that is her real mother.

And then there is the title character. Gilgi is ambitious, independent, perceptive but also misguided, and we root for her at every turn. Keun doesn’t just show what Gilgi says and does, she also reveals what is on her mind (the book’s fast-flowing streams of consciousness are expertly translated by Geoff Wilkes).

The result is something quite special: a lost-and-found classic featuring an endearing protagonist, one we get to know inside out.