by Irmgard Keun
Keun followed Gilgi, One of Us with The Artificial Silk Girl—which was also a bestseller—in 1932, less than a year before the Nazis came to power. On November 30, 1933, the German Book Trade Association sent Universitas a form letter headlined “WORKS WHOSE SALE IS NOT DESIRED,” which announced that: “With the agreement of the Fighting League for German Culture, we inform you that for national and cultural reasons the offer and the sale of the works named below is considered undesirable, and must therefore cease.” The “works named” included both Gilgi, One of Us and The Artificial Silk Girl and, incidentally, three titles by one of the fictional Gilgi’s favorite authors, Jack London (see this page).
The “national and cultural reasons” that prompted the prohibition of Keun’s novels were not described further in the Book Trade Association’s letter to Universitas. However, many aspects of Gilgi, One of Us were obviously contrary to Nazi sensibilities. The association’s reference to “national” reasons probably includes Gilgi’s distaste for demonstrative patriotism:
“Martin—I belong here.—What happens here is my business—all of it. A sad country, you say? Martin, even at school I was ashamed when they sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’—such a revolting song—so oily when you were saying the words, so oily when you were thinking them, your whole mouth full of cod-liver oil.—Those people—who force their love of the fatherland on you—do you understand that— …” (this page).
But Gilgi’s clearest divergences from Nazi ideals originate in her self-concept as a woman, which encompasses a commitment to a professional career, sex independent of marriage, an acceptance of abortion for economic reasons, and a resolve to support her child as a single mother. And Gilgi’s attitudes are shared at least in part by her friends Olga and Hertha, and her colleague Fräulein Behrend.
It is perhaps worth noting in passing that although the Book Trade Association made no detailed criticism of Gilgi, One of Us in November 1933, at least two specific complaints were laid out later. On December 12, 1934, the police in the Silesian city of Opole wrote to the Gestapo in Berlin seeking advice about suppressing a copy of the novel that had remained in a local library, and quoting Gilgi’s words about “Deutschland über alles” as evidence of the narrative’s “hostility to the state.” And on September 19, 1934, the Reich Office for the Promotion of German Literature had also consulted the Gestapo about a copy of Gilgi, One of Us in a Berlin library, complaining on behalf of the Reich Federation of German Civil Servants that “the reputation of female postal workers” was “insulted in the crudest way” by the narrative’s incidental comment that if a group of street prostitutes “weren’t wearing make-up and using belladonna you could take them for unemployed telephone operators” (this page).
As I have explained in my afterword to Melville House’s edition of After Midnight (1937), Keun never entirely recovered from the damage which the advent of Nazism inflicted on her creativity and her career. She published nothing more of substance until she had left Germany in 1936; she struggled with financial difficulties, psychological strain, and professional self-doubt while producing three novels and a volume of short stories after emigrating; she necessarily fell silent once she was overtaken by the invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 and, for sheer lack of other options, returned clandestinely to Germany; and she wrote very little in the decades between her sixth novel in 1950 and her death in 1982, although she did live to experience the belated recognition which was accorded to her work when critics and scholars began extensive study of writing by women, and writing by anti-Nazi exiles, in the 1970s.
GILGI, ONE OF US
The identity which Gilgi asserts places her at the center of the Weimar Republic’s debates about the so-called New Woman. Gilgi, One of Us was of course only one among many novels of the period in which New Women played important roles, though arguably it can be located more precisely within a kind of sub-genre which featured female typists, and which included works such as Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel (1929) and Rudolf Braune’s The Girl at the Orga Privat (1930; Orga Privat was a brand of typewriter). In fact, Gilgi references Christa Anita Brück’s 1930 contribution to this sub-genre when she tells Martin that she tries to deflect her employers’ sexual advances “without starting some great drama of outraged honor, like in that novel, Tragedies at the Typewriter!” (this page).
Despite Gilgi’s comment here, “great drama” is a constant and significant element in her own story. Gilgi’s initial self-concept is founded on a fierce commitment to material and emotional self-sufficiency. Her meditations during the first scene in her attic room are about professional success through her own efforts, whether through her skills in office work, foreign languages, or dress design. She is equally self-contained when she decides that the departure of Olga’s brother after their brief romantic interlude is “as it should be” (this page), and that spending time as a family with Herr and Frau Kron “is always a pointless waste of time” (this page). But simultaneously as the narrative communicates all this, it also suggests that Gilgi’s autonomous persona is somewhat self-conscious and exaggerated, as when she “assumes her best woman-of-the-world expression” (this page) while discussing with Olga how to divert her boss Herr Reuter’s sexual advances without endangering her job. Moreover, the narrative notes how Gilgi avoids showing her admiration for Olga by criticizing the “dirty marks” (this page) on her blouse instead, and how “if she didn’t have such a distaste for the word ‘romance,’ you could say: for Gilgi, Olga represents romance” (this page), as though Gilgi’s studied self-sufficiency will eventually face challenges from circumstances and emotions which she cannot disregard forever.
When these challenges duly emerge, they do so in a greatly dramatic manner. Firstly, the Krons reveal that Gilgi is adopted, and when she seeks out the woman whom the Krons believe to be her birth mother, Fräulein Täschler, the plot thickens still further: the impoverished Fräulein Täschler explains that she passed Gilgi off as her own child because she was paid by a well-to-do family who concealed their unmarried daughter’s pregnancy to preserve their reputation in society. These revelations encourage Gilgi to reflect on how much her career success so far owes to her middle-class upbringing with the Krons as well as to her own efforts (“Just don’t stick your nose so high in the air, just don’t always think it’s so completely your own doing,” this page), and to sympathize with those who are less successful than she is, such as the unemployed “pale woman” who also applied for the casual typing job which Gilgi secures with Herr Mahrenholz (this page–this page). Secondly, Gilgi falls suddenly and tumultuously in love with Martin, with the narrative characterizing her attraction to his bohemian, exuberant personality as the more or less inevitable reflex of her rationality and self-containment:
Gilgi’s imagination was always a well-behaved child: it was allowed to play in the street, but not to go beyond the corner. Now the well-behaved child is venturing a little further for once. Martin talks, and Gilgi sees: oceans, deserts, countries—but that’s not the essence of what she’s seeing, she’d like to make an accounting to herself—as she always does—to record her feelings in her own words. Oh, my little, gray words! That someone can speak so colorfully! She’s sitting on a sphere that’s damp with rain—there’s a sun far, far away in the sky—with each hand you grab a sunbeam, […] you’re getting closer and closer to the sun’s hot orange-red ball. (this page)
As her emotional dependence on Martin increases, Gilgi abandons her material and professional ambitions almost entirely, for example by doing “something […] disorienting and momentous” (this page) in absenting herself from work on a false plea of illness, and later by actively welcoming the loss of her job when the hard-pressed Herr Reuter reduces his staff: “Thank God, thank God—now it’s not my fault, I can’t be blamed” (this page).
Gilgi’s story reaches its peak of drama after she encounters her former friend Hans, and undertakes to save him from jail by repaying the twelve hundred marks h
e has embezzled to feed his destitute family. This leads her to contact her affluent birth mother Frau Greif for the first time (“I want you to give me five hundred marks, and I want to tell you that you’re my mother,” this page), Frau Greif hands over several rings which were gifts from her husband (“every time he cheats on me he gives me a piece of jewelry,” this page), Gilgi is then diverted from delivering her own money and the rings by Martin’s jealous demands on her (“I want you to stay here, Gilgi—do you hear me, I want you to,” this page), and the next morning she discovers that Hans, his wife Hertha and their two children have committed suicide. Gilgi reacts to this dénouement by resolving to seek work in Berlin (where she intends to bear her child and raise it by herself), leaving Martin immediately. For Gilgi has decided that her love for Martin is destroying her autonomy completely, but that she should not expect him to adapt his life to hers in any way, as she explains to her friend Pit:
Even if I weren’t having the child—I’d have to leave him—for my sake and for his sake. I can’t work, Pit—if I’m with him. I’ve already tried, and I’ve seen and lived what happens then. I just love him too much—and in every way, and I only have to look at him for everything else to become meaningless to me, utterly, utterly meaningless. […] And you see, Pit, I have to work and keep my life in order … he doesn’t have enough money to support me—and anyway I wouldn’t want him to, if he did have enough. […] And he’s not at all used to working for money. He doesn’t understand it. And you know, someone can probably change of their own accord—but wanting to change someone else just means making life difficult for yourself and for them. (this page–this page)
Thus at the end of the novel Gilgi reverts to and intensifies one of the attitudes which she demonstrated at the beginning. She does not simply reiterate that professional success is purely a matter of individual effort (“I’ve seen so many people who looked for work and didn’t find it—but most of them only half-wanted it, they’d already given up on everything. […] My will is stronger and more durable,” this page), but she expects to succeed notwithstanding that she is now unemployed, without any support from the Krons, and intending to assume sole care of a baby. Gilgi also reverts in a significant sense to her emotional self-sufficiency, regarding her baby as a kind of insurance against further romantic entanglements (“without the child, without such a stark necessity it would’ve been harder. I would’ve had no armor—and so alone—maybe some man or other—,” this page), though presumably she feels a connection to the baby, and through it to Martin, and she has a confused hope that she will be reunited with Martin eventually: “And then if I’m making a living later—a good, secure living—and the child—Pit, don’t you think too that then he’d come to me and be proud and happy, and everything would turn out right?” (this page).
In characterizing Gilgi’s initial self-concept as somewhat overwrought, and then showing how it fluctuates through dramas of abandonment, passion, jealousy, suicide, and “flight” (this page), the narrative maintains a measure of detachment from her, and it extends this detachment by signaling doubts about Gilgi’s ultimate plans, particularly in the final scene when she boards the train to Berlin. The most obvious signal is when Gilgi tries to smile, to convince Pit that she is confident about the future, but only “half-succeed[s]” (this page). The repeated image of the orange lying in front of the locomotive (which clearly invokes Gilgi’s love for Martin; see this page) is similarly ambiguous, as it is uncertain whether the orange is crushed by the departing train or lies far enough below the machinery to survive unscathed. And there is a more subtle double-edged allusion in the description of how Gilgi “gives Pit her hand once more” (this page) from the train, as this recalls the song—known in German as “Reich mir zum Abschied noch einmal die Hände” and in English as “Good Night”—which is in Gilgi’s thoughts earlier in the novel (see this page), and which is sung by the lovers Victoria and Stephan in the operetta and film Victoria and Her Hussar (1930 and 1931) immediately before they are separated. This reference could ridicule Gilgi’s decision to renounce Martin in the hope of an eventual reunion by linking it with a kitschy popular drama, but that reunion could also be foreshadowed by the fact that Victoria and Stephan are married at the end of their story.
There are also some short passages earlier in the novel which have implications for Gilgi’s plans after she leaves Cologne. The first is when Herr Kron reads out a newspaper report about a woman who killed her child by jumping with it from “the Treptow Bridge” (this page), which is in Berlin. The second is when Fräulein Täschler recalls that many of her customers “didn’ want anythin’ to do with me anymore” (this page) when she was passing herself off as Gilgi’s unmarried mother. The third is when Gilgi reads a letter from the “little Dutch girl” who is “still in love with Martin” (this page), and who still writes to him. All three passages are bad omens for Gilgi’s ideas about supporting herself as a single mother in Berlin, and perhaps one day returning to Martin, though of course these omens are of no account if Gilgi really is as exceptionally competent as she believes, and it is possible that she would encounter less prejudice than Fräulein Täschler suffered twenty years previously.
The narrative’s slightly detached presentation of Gilgi’s frenetic present and her ambiguous future is complemented by its account of her difficulties in expressing herself verbally. Although there was some justification for the dismissive remark of Keun’s great contemporary Kurt Tucholsky that the characters in Gilgi, One of Us too often speak “as though they’d just been eating Freud for breakfast,” later commentators such as Ritta Jo Horsley have shown that the issue is more complex than that. For the novel emphasizes what Horsley has termed “Gilgi’s crisis of language” repeatedly, most often by describing her relationship to “words” (“Worte” in the German text). For example, the difference between Gilgi’s psychology and Martin’s which is apparent at their first meeting is encapsulated in her sense (in the passage quoted above) that she has only “little, gray words,” and her wonder that Martin “can speak so colorfully.” When Gilgi tries shortly afterwards to clarify her feelings for Martin, she thinks that she “should probably talk to someone, but there wouldn’t actually be any point. Because she doesn’t have any words, to make herself understood” (this page). She does talk to Olga later, but only to reiterate her linguistic deficiencies:
And you’re together at night and walk beside each other during the day, without a single word that binds you—you only catch words which are soap-bubbles. […] And you’re all ripped up, and have typewriter words and clockwork words and everyday words and don’t want to think about yourself and should think about yourself. (this page)
And nothing changes in the remainder of the narrative. When Gilgi is preoccupied after visiting Hertha, and Martin worries that she no longer loves him, she asks herself: “Why don’t I have any words—for Martin—or for myself, either?” (this page); and when Martin’s possessiveness flares again as she explains why she is giving Frau Greif’s rings to Hans and Hertha, Gilgi feels “more and more of her words […] sliding back inside her” (this page–this page).
However, there are few indications that, if Gilgi were ever to articulate her thoughts and feelings more clearly, Martin would listen to her. When Gilgi leaves the Krons and goes to Martin’s apartment, she is still debating aloud whether to live there or in her attic room when he—“ignoring these words completely” (this page)—starts unpacking her suitcase. On a subsequent occasion when Gilgi talks to Martin in bed, it turns out that “he’s asleep” (this page). And in the conversation about Frau Greif’s rings mentioned above, Martin’s interpretation of Gilgi’s sympathy for Hans is shaped by jealousy: “So this is what I understand now—an old boyfriend of yours was here, and you concealed that from me” (this page). Martin’s failures to listen to Gilgi are paralleled for most of the narrative by Pit: for instance when she seeks him out after her first encounter with Fräulein Täschler, but he delivers a po
litical monologue while she waits in vain “for a moment when she can interrupt him and tell him about the things which are more important to her, and have more to do with her, just now” (this page), or when he refuses to discuss her relationship with Martin because he is attracted to her himself: “Why are you telling me this—you! That’s why you came to me—that’s why … just to tell me …” (this page). It is also worth noting that Gilgi’s relationship with Martin meets with blank incomprehension and uncompromising rejection from the Krons: Frau Kron can only account for it by wailing that “some man has hypnotized you” (this page), and Herr Kron can only deal with it by “laying down the law” (this page) and forbidding Gilgi the house, leaving her to conclude that “there just isn’t any common ground” (this page) between her and her adoptive parents. But those in the older generation who claim to empathize with Gilgi and her peers leave her unmoved, as she complains to Martin about “those old people who have thrown themselves into the new era. The ones who write about sport-oriented modern youth, driving cars, short skirts, short hair, and jazz, and have an amazing ability to hit the nail right next to the head” (this page).