What I Am Reading: "The Artificial Silk Girl" by Irmgard Keun

“…a woman should never wear artificial silk when she’s with a man. It wrinkles too quickly, and what are you going to look like after seven kisses? Only pure silk, I say - and music - “

This is another modernist novel from the Weimar Republic, the story of Doris, a "material girl" (as the introduction by Maria Tartar puts it) who travels to Berlin from an unnamed city to make it as an actress. My first big pandemic media consumption was of Criterion’s German Expressionism collection, so I was sort of looking forward to a Weimar Cinema story, which this did not turn out to be.

In the first third of the novel, Doris bluffs her way into a speaking role in a stage play and, flush with success, steals a fur coat; thus prompting her flight to Berlin for both aspirational and fugitive reasons. This Doris is the most fun, as she fends off leches at work and tells tall tales to elevate herself in the eyes of the stage extras. Once she is in Berlin, her activities focus on securing enough patronage from a lover to allow her to consume and, eventually, just to survive. She bumps up against the edge of poverty and comes to the verge of finding love after spiraling down through a string of unsuccessful, subsistence-level affairs. At the end she leaves a man she loves who cannot get over his estranged wife, though hope springs eternal at the novel's end.

According to the introduction, the novel was inspired by Berlin Alexanderplatz, and Keun was directly encouraged by Alfred Doblin. She wrote it at the very end of the Weimar Republic, and it was banned by the Nazis. Keun fled the country, though she eventually returned to live incognito; and she fortunately went on to become a slightly more celebrated author at the end of her life. Stylistically, I can clearly see the influence of Berlin Alexanderplatz, as the story is told through a series of rambling diary entries that are only slightly more grounded, due to the second-person discourse, than Franz Biberkopf's world. That novel is long and this one is short, and I for one could have stomached plenty more of it. Doris was a funny character, both when she (as a character) means to be and when she does't, such as in her completely ignorance of the politics that would shortly become very important. She jumps from one topic to the next, materially fixated upon appearance. There are bad novels about Weimar Berlin, but are there any bad novels from it? Not yet.