Goethe Book Club
Goethe Book Club: The Artificial Silk Girl (1932), by Irmgard Keun

Tue, 10/04/2022
6:30 PM Eastern

Online

Read and discuss works by German authors in this series hosted by the Goethe-Institut Washington. All books can be read in English translation or in the German original; our discussion will be in English. Please Note: In order to participate in the online discussion (carried out over Zoom), registrants must obtain access to the novel on their own. Hard copies of the novel can be ordered through multiple vendors online; the eBook is also available for download to Kindle, iPad, and other digital reading platforms.
RSVP Das kunstseidene Mädchen / The Artificial Silk Girl, by Irmgard Keun

In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht’s Three Penny Opera.

Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin’s “golden twenties” with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun’s work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published, in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war.

Today, more than seven decades later, the story of this quintessential “material girl” remains as relevant as ever, as an accessible new translation brings this lost classic to light once more.

Irmgard Keun, born in Berlin in 1905, enjoyed sensational success with her first two novels, Gilgi - One of Us and The Artificial Silk Girl. She went into exile in 1936 and returned to Germany four years later with false papers, where she lived unrecognized. In the staid literary world of the post-war period, she was initially unable to match the success of her first books until her novels were rediscovered by a broad public at the end of the 1970s. Keun died in 1982 and is today one of the most important German-language authors of the 20th century.

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Discussion of Keun's novel will take place virtually via Zoom on Tuesday, October 4, at 6:30pm Eastern. Please RSVP via Eventbrite in order to receive discussion prompts and the Zoom invite link.
Discussion prompts from the facilitator will be emailed to all participants RSVP'd via Eventbrite in advance of the discussion. The Zoom invite and additional directions/tips for accessing the Zoom discussion will be emailed to all participants no less than 48 hours before the discussion begins. The discussion will take place in English.