The Artificial Silk Girl: A Book Review of Sorts

This book took me by surprise. I loaned it from our local library in Sandy because it was short and in among the classics. I'd never heard of it, nor the author, Irmgard Keun. I checked out reviews on Goodreads and it struggles with diverse ratings, a text for study in Germany it seems - not much loved by many students, whilst at the same time scoring highly among many readers. Now having read it, I think I understand why.

Originally published in 1932, The Artificial Silk Girl and all of Keun's other works were banned by the Nazi Party in 1933. Indeed (according to Goodreads) all copies of the The Artificial Silk Girl were destroyed or lost in the chaos of WWII and might well have been forgotten, but for one English translation held in Great Britain. From this translation the book was reborn, and translated once more into German. Now it provides a rare insight into the broken society of Germany and the Weimar Republic as perceived by an artist of the period.

So why is this book so divisive among readers?

When I first started to read this - after reading George Orwell's 1984 - I was taken aback by how awful I thought it was. The writing struck me as childlike. A blurb of words without meaning, repetitive in a terrible echo-like manner. And there were no redeeming features to the narrator - a poverty-struck young lady of 18 from a provincial German town who flees to Berlin; materialistic and shallow, as deep as a muddy puddle, snobbish despite her family's poverty. With no other three-dimensional, carefully crafted characters to engage with I couldn't find a plot either, and I honestly thought the book had been lost in translation. I was close to shelving it as not worth the time, but I'm glad I didn't.

Instead I took a step back, read some low and high star reviews to better understand the disparity of its Goodreads reception, and only then realised I needed to change my approach to reading it. The Artificial Silk Girl is not a story to be read in a conventional sense. Nor is it a diary with structure. Instead it's more akin to a journal of random thoughts and haphazard feelings, often unconnected, that the reader needs to let wash over them. Rather than a story it is a sense of place and time, of extremes, of poverty and wealth co-existing in a broken society, and as a man who loves history it provides a wonderful insight into the Weimar Republic. It considers the social and economic boundaries of gender, money, education, and class that cannot be crossed, the high life of the lucky few compared to the abject hunger, poverty, and violence sustained by those considered at the bottom; the bright city lights they share, that shine on them all.

Come the end of this book I was really impressed.

It read like a piece of art.

Confronting. Not nice.

But good.

I'm actually going to give it five stars, largely because it made me rethink my reading. It's also worth noting that Irmgard Keun is a fascinating character in her own right. Not only were her works banned by the Nazis, but she was forced to flee Germany to the Netherlands where she lived using an alias before returning to Germany in the '40s, the Nazi authorities believing her dead. Sadly her later life was overshadowed by alcoholism, homelessness, and mental illness, though her work was rediscovered in the 1970s prior to her death in 1982. When her daughter, Martina Keun-Geburtig, was asked if her mother was a happy woman, she answered:

Irmgard Keun

"Well, she always said that the Nazis took her best years."

Until next time,

Toodle pip...

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