by Irmgard Keun
I want to get to the Zoo station waiting room — maybe Kreuzstanger’s Karl will be there. I would very much like to ask him to give me some time without sex. You have to be able to wait, especially with a woman. I wonder if he’d understand. I’ll never get used to one without education which is where I would belong — and one with education is not going to get used to me. But I can’t just walk down the Tauentzien and with the big industrialists, I just can’t be with a man right now. It’s just like it was with Hubert — because my body is a lot more faithful than I am. Nothing you can do about it. But it’ll pass, I’m sure. For now, my sensuality is in prison. That’s love. Someday, it’s going to be released.
It’s not that important, really — I’m a little drunk — maybe I won’t go to the Zoo station waiting room. Instead I’ll go to an elegant dark bar, where you can’t see that my eyes are dead with tears — and I’ll let myself be invited by someone and nothing else — and I’ll dance, dance, dance — I so much feel like dancing — Das ist die Liebe der Matrosen — we’re only good or bad when we love, or we’re nothing at all for lack of love — and we don’t deserve to be loved, of course, but otherwise we’d have no home at all.
I’m going to go look for Karl after all, he always wanted me — and I’ll say to him: Karl, let’s work together. I will milk your goat and stitch eyes on your little dolls, and I will get used to you with everything that’s involved — but you have to give me time and you have to leave me alone — you have to let these things take their course — and if you don’t want to, if you don’t want to, then I’ll have to do it on my own — where should I go? But I don’t want anyone to kiss me. And I’ve had enough of the office — I don’t want to go back to what I had before, because it was no good. I don’t want to work, but I have buoys of cork in my stomach. They won’t let me go down, will they?
Dear Ernst. In my thoughts I’m giving you a blue sky, I love you. I want — want — I don’t know — I want to be with Karl. I want to do everything together with him. If he doesn’t want to — I won’t work, I’d rather go on the Tauentzien and become a star.
But I could just as well turn into a Hulla — and if I became a star, I might actually be a worse person than a Hulla, who was good. Perhaps glamour isn’t all that important after all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905. After a stint as a stenographer in Cologne, she started training at the local drama school. Her acting career culminated in an engagement at the renowned Thalia Theater in Hamburg.
In 1931, at age 21, she published her first novel, Gilgi, A Girl Just Like Us, the story of a stenographer who sacrifices her professional ambitions for a passionate love affair. Her second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, appeared only one year later, and instantly became a bestseller.
With the rise of the Nazis in 1933, Keun’s books were blacklisted. The author left Germany for Belgium in 1936, and later for the Netherlands, where she met fellow exiles Stefan Zweig, Ernst Toller, Hermann Kesten, and Joseph Roth. Keun published three more novels in exile. In 1940, the Nazis conquered Holland, forcing her to return to Germany, where she survived the war in hiding.
After the war, Keun continued her literary career but enjoyed only modest success, until her early novels were rediscovered and reissued in the late 1970s — in the wake of the feminist movement in Germany.
Keun refused the many invitations to document her tumultuous life in an autobiography. She died in 1982 in Cologne.