Following Roth’s death, and the uncertainty with Strauss (in May 1938 she finally crossed the Atlantic, as Kully and her father do in Child of All Nations, but at the end of eight weeks she crossed back; neither America nor bourgeois life as a doctor’s wife were what she was cut out for) and the subsequent invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, she did the oddest thing. She returned to Germany and lived there, semi-legally (she had managed to get a passport issued in the name of Charlotte Tralow), with her parents, in Cologne and on the Rhine. It was a distraction, and no doubt a help, that a mistaken report of her suicide was put about in the English press, but it remains doubtful how she got by. After the war, she wrote humorous and satirical sketches for magazines and the radio, had a child – a daughter, Martina, whom she brought up herself – and wrote one more novel, Ferdinand, der Mann mit dem freundlichen Herzen (‘Ferdinand, the kind-hearted man’), published in 1950. Her good, and indeed her great, earlier books were obscure and out of print, and it was only at the very end of her life that she was partially rediscovered by a far younger generation of feminists, including the poet Ursula Krechel and the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek. I’ve no doubt that, had she been a man, her work would have been made available in valorous boxed sets and collected editions. All in all, it seems a sorry second half of her life, in and out of hospital for alcohol and alcohol-related matters. She distinguished herself by steadfastly refusing to write an autobiography, and died in 1982, at the age of seventy-seven – or, as she would have put it, seventy-two.
In the exiled circle in which Keun moved in the mid-to-late 1930s, she was continually bemused and disappointed by the chosen subject matter of her peers: ‘What are the other émigrés writing? Kesten has a novel about Philip II, Roth has one about the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, Zweig is writing on Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas Mann on “Lotte in Weimar”, Heinrich Mann on Henri IV, Feuchtwanger on Nero… Who is writing the great book about now?’ She is right: more than ever, it seems like a professional deformation (or at least dereliction) on the part of her contemporaries. Perhaps they wanted to assert their independence from day-to-day politics, accepting (like Roth) the necessity for struggle in their journalism, but still trying to dream in their novels; certainly, exile internationalized them, and history drew them, because there at least – even as Hitler proclaimed a thousand-year Reich – things still began and ended; or perhaps it was merely their attempt, encouraged by their hard-up émigré publishers, to serve a readership that knew most of the same things they did, and itself craved respite and escape. Who wants to read about Germany now, they must have thought.
Keun has few rivals – I can think of none – as a chronicler of the ambience (in After Midnight, which is set in Frankfurt on the day Hitler comes to town) or the consequences (in Child of All Nations) of the rise of Nazism. Her canny choice of ‘small’ central figures, Sanna – the latest off her assembly line of outspoken and straightforward girls in difficult circumstances – and the nine-year-old Kully, allows her to refract and comment on huge themes without using big words; it provides an ideal entry, a shrewd lever. Kully is a wonderful, a purely delightful creation – reminiscent of Kay Thompson’s Eloise (‘My name is Eloise and I live at the Plaza’), Geoffrey Willans’s Molesworth or Richmal Crompton’s William, or the real-life nine-year-old Daisy Ashford (author of The Young Visiters) – but the really inspired touch is Keun’s placing her in the forbiddingly grown-up contexts of dictatorship and exile.
No one who wants to learn about or imagine the German diaspora of the 1930s could do better than pick up Child of All Nations. When, following Hitler’s coming to power in Germany in 1933, a generation of German writers were turned loose upon the mercy of European exile, they clustered round improvised or adapted periodical- and book-publishing centres in Paris, Amsterdam and Prague. Hundreds lived in the comfortless proximity of Thomas Mann in Sanary-sur-mer in the South of France. (‘The malicious village of exile’ is the brilliant Auden phrase; as Mann’s son-in-law, he may even have had Sanary in mind.) The print-runs – and by inference, the advances – of German-language books printed abroad were one-twentieth of what they had been in Germany. (Joseph Roth had the reputation of being the toughest and most successful bargainer; other authors quickly learned that there was little point in calling on publishers after he had been.) The revelation of Keun is of a lavish existence of hotels and restaurants and first-class travel that kept one imprisoned in a sort of luxurious but penurious bubble. One couldn’t afford to break the illusion, say, by making economies, because that would destroy one’s credit, and one had no other asset but that credit, and that credit in turn could only be funded by the most shameless and outrageous begging. It seems axiomatic that one could not live and earn money in the same place – wherever one was was either taboo or already skint – and so Peter goes off on his rounds of Europe, leaving wife and child, as they perfectly understand, in pawn. It is a wonderfully formalized machinery: where one lives wildly beyond one’s means, because anything else is so entirely beyond one; where one does either real work for phantom money, or, slightly better, no work for real money; where travel money is used for staying, and staying money pays for travel; it is the institution of the impossible in place of life.
As a child, Kully displays simultaneously the desire to understand, the flexibility to accommodate and the propensity to question; all of which makes her the perfect vehicle for the counter-intuitive world of the literary exile. Hers is a justly peripheral view of a peripheral condition. She is of course far and away the oldest and wisest character in the book – her mother’s keeper, her father’s agent, way beyond any teacher or policeman or (if they had been invented) social worker in what she knows and how she learns. She knows there are exceptions, but she also knows there are rules. She knows the drawbacks of the free beach as opposed to the paying beach, she knows how to peel prawns faster than her mother, she knows that French is something you can pick up in a morning, she knows (from opening her father’s letter to her mother) that ‘a novelist shouldn’t go all literary in his letters’ (which does sound to me like Roth) and she knows from her mother that ‘of all the things she needed to know in her life, there was not one that she’d learned at school’. She knows the curious fact that ‘books are made in factories as well, but only after they’ve been written’, but then she knows everything there is to know about the writing of them, as witness the fantastic scene with the publisher Herr Krabbe. She is on familiar terms with death, suicide, mental breakdown, hysteria, marital infidelity, international politics (‘Hitler belongs to the Germans, but the Italians have one of their own, called Mussolini’), tricks and deceptions of all kinds. She’s done things that belong in tall tales: ‘The children don’t believe me when I say I’ve been on a sleigh in the Carpathians with my father and a Polish hunter, and have lain on a fur in a hut and eaten bear steaks.’ She has an altogether formidable repertoire of alcoholic drinks. She knows that school atlases give a very poor account of the world: ‘In reality, all those countries look nothing like that, and most of them I’ve seen for myself, so I know.’ And then – so typical of her – the child’s indomitable way of turning a hardship into a badge of distinction: ‘And I expect we’ll get to see the remaining ones in time too.’
I have one minor quarrel with Child of All Nations, which was a delight to translate: I don’t like the ending. I don’t think Kully should have gone to America. It almost seems like a sequel, tacked on and taken fast. For all that the American passage also ends, becoming not a resolution but one further episode, it breaks the claustrophobia of the book. But then it was always going to be a difficult book to end, following Keun’s own movements all the way, as it did. In musical terms, it needs, and gets, a sort of fade-out. I think she would have liked a happy ending (for her own morale, and that of her readers), but that was never a possibility, not for Keun, and not in 1938. (In any case, exile is imprevisible, not a fixed sentence but an open-ended condition.) She did a
t least scrape past a possible bad ending, with – for the one time in the book – father, mother and Kully each on their own, in three different places, in America, in Europe and on the boat. That, in itself, was a kind of triumph. That they are ever all together again – little brother or no – and making their strange go of things in Holland or wherever, we have to take on trust.
Michael Hofmann
Hamburg
December 2006
* Dialect of German spoken in Cologne. (Trans.)
* Widely and wildly celebrated in Cologne, which is historically a Catholic city. (Trans.)
* Probably do-goodishly inspired by J. W. von Goethe and Charlotte von Stein. (Trans.)
* Orange is the national colour of the Netherlands because its royal family used to own the principality of Orange. The celebrations were, most likely, for the fortieth anniversary of Queen Wilhelmina in 1938. (Trans.)
* Cf. Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte(1892). (Trans.)
* The Dionne quintuplets – all girls, born on 28 May 1934 – were the first known to survive beyond infancy. (Trans.)
* Anthem of the Nazi party from 1930 to 1945. (Trans.)
* Perversely instituted retail outlet for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. (Trans.)
Child of All Nations Page 15