The Artificial Silk Girl

W
hen
The Artificial Silk Girl
first appeared in English in 1933, it was part of an ongoing cultural exchange between Germany and Great Britain. But it was not only the fact that Keun’s novel had been a bestseller in Germany that prompted its instant translation; it was also one of the last accounts of everyday German life before the Nazis came to power. By the time the English translation appeared in Great Britain, Keun’s books had already been banned in Germany. Thus star translator Basil Creighton made a special point of emphasizing the political environment encountered by Keun’s
Artificial Silk Girl
in Berlin, adding passages in the translation that were designed specifically to help readers position
Keun’s novel in the context of then-recent German political developments.

While there can be no doubt about Keun’s anti-Nazi sentiment, her “artificial silk girl” doesn’t really have any political convictions. In fact, she is completely clueless when it comes to politics, and therefore a perfect example for so many Germans of that time who realized what they had gotten caught up in only when it was too late to do much about it. In that sense,
The Artificial Silk Girl
can be read as an historical document, an entertaining and disturbing account of what it was like to be a young woman in Berlin as the Golden Twenties were drawing to a close.

But to my mind, such an historical reading is only of secondary importance for the modern reader. What makes us identify with Keun’s protagonist Doris is not so much the fact that she is a classic example of the German “bystander,” but rather that she is the quintessential “material girl.” Doris may not understand the headlines of the daily papers, but she does understand the message of the illustrated press mandating her to mold her life after the glamorous models presented on the movie screen and on the pages of glossy magazines she reads every day. In her desperate pursuit of this kind of happiness, her effort to become the flesh and blood rendition of those media icons, Doris features as a predecessor of the Bridget Joneses, the Carrie Bradshaws, and the shopaholic Rebecca Bloomwoods of our day.

The historical and cultural parameters may have changed. However, the basic message remains the same: women have entered the professional world. They are expected to stand on their own feet. But their standard of living continues to depend on a husband’s income, and hence they and the world around them continue to measure their success by their ability to get a man to commit. This requires a serious investment in personal appearance, the ability to “play stupid” when necessary, and a willingness to deny their own emotional needs—all in an effort to acquire a relationship that will assure the life that is held out by the media as the only one worth living.

The critical response to this message made Keun a bestselling author in the 1930s—just as Helen Fielding, Candace Bushnell, and Sophie Kinsella are today. It is mainly for this reason that I think it is important to make a fresh English translation of Keun’s
The Artificial Silk Girl
accessible to audiences now.

Kathie von Ankum
New York City, 2001

D
oris, the artificial silk girl in the title of Irmgard Keun’s acclaimed novel, is a collector of images: “I walk around the streets and the restaurants and among people and lanterns. And then I try to remember what I’ve seen.” If the narrator of Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” achieved acclaim by declaring, “I am a camera,” Doris, too, insists that she works in a visual rather than verbal medium. She may “write everything down,” but she feels nothing but contempt for diarists, who traffic in mere words. “I want to write like a movie,” she declares, offering continuous reels rather than mere snapshots of the world she inhabits. If Doris is unable to script her life in exactly the way she desires, she nonetheless
succeeds in producing powerful images that enlarge our understanding of the culture of everyday life in an era that came to be known as the “golden twenties.”

With her focus on surfaces, appearances, skins, faces, and façades, Doris self-consciously sets herself against the literary tradition of confessional narratives. She has no intention of baring her soul, interrogating her motives, or expressing her feelings. One of her first descriptive moves is trained on her body rather than on what goes on in her mind: “I’m sitting in my room in my nightgown, which has slipped off my famous shoulder, and everything about me is just first class — only my left leg is slightly wider than my right one.” It is no accident that Doris’s story begins with the theft of a fur coat. (“I felt like kissing it, that’s how much I loved it.”) That transgression changes her life, marking a transition from home (a place that offers intimacy, even if in somewhat troubled form) to the big city (an arena in which she will judge and be judged by surface appearances alone). With her second skin, Doris leaves behind what is presumably the town of Cologne to seek her fortune in the city of Berlin.

In Cologne, Doris had worked as an actress on a small stage, reciting a single line from a play by the renowned German dramatist Friedrich Schiller. In Berlin, she attempts to move beyond bit parts and to fashion herself into a screen idol, hoping to enter Berlin’s cinematic culture but also seeking to become an icon of
seductive glamour in her own film. Doris is unable to realize the Hollywood dream, to star in the master narrative that will take her from rags to riches. The constant friction between her materialistic desires and her romantic ambitions derails efforts to become upward mobile. It is as if Doris has joined the cast of a play by the Viennese dramatist Arthur Schnitzler. At once naive and cynical, innocent and corrupt, she experiences life as a series of “episodes,” short-term affairs — bitter and sweet, in varying proportions — that lead nowhere.

If Doris fails to plot her life along the lines of Hollywood melodrama, she nonetheless succeeds in producing a document in the cinematic style
(Kinostil)
endorsed by the celebrated novelist Alfred Döblin, the Berlin physician who was also one of Weimar Germany’s leading intellectuals. Doris becomes a camera, recording the sights and sounds of city life. Her affair with Brenner, a blind veteran, becomes an opportunity for intensifying her power of vision. To Brenner’s question “What did you see?” Doris responds with the visual acuity of the artist George Grosz. “I saw — men standing at corners selling perfume, without a coat and a pert face and a gray cap on — and posters with naked and rosy girls on them and nobody looking at them.… I saw — a man with a sign around his neck, ‘I will accept any work’ with ‘any’ underlined three times in red — and a spiteful mouth, the corners of which were drawn increasingly down.”

When Doris takes Brenner out for a night on the town, she evokes Berlin nightlife with its heady distractions and cheerless glamour. Wandering through the streets, stopping at cafes and restaurants, Doris desperately seeks to persuade herself and Brenner that Berlin has the power to energize and invigorate with its myriad diversions. “I just want him to like my Berlin.” But Doris’s power of vision, despite its relentless focus on surfaces, ends by penetrating through to what lies beneath the surface entertainments. “The city isn’t good and the city isn’t happy and the city is sick,” Brenner concludes after seeing Berlin through Doris’s eyes. Like George Grosz’s sketches of street scenes and night life, Doris’s account exposes existential anxiety and icy estrangement. “And sometimes somebody is laughing — and that laugh is stuffing all of yesterday’s and today’s anger back into the mouth that it’s oozing from.” Uncovering the pathologies of urban life through her laser-like vision, she herself ends by feeling physically and spiritually depleted.

Doris’s departure from home begins as a kind of fairy-tale adventure. Like the heroine of the Grimms’ fairy tale “Allerleirauh,” she leaves home wearing a pelt as disguise and makes her way through the world looking for a second home. But the artificial silk girl fails to emerge as a triumphant fairy-tale heroine and becomes a double of Hans Christian Andersen’s little match girl, homeless and exposed to the elements in a physically and spiritually
chilling site on Christmas night. “I’m freezing to death with loneliness,” she declares, shortly before spending the night on a park bench. In a rare confessional moment, Doris avows that her goal is to find a way home: “Every human being is like a stove for my heart that is homesick but not always longing for my parents’ house, but for a real home.” The fairy-tale dream of establishing a new home is shattered by the grim realities of urban life.

That Doris discovers real companionship in her relationship to a war veteran is no coincidence. The veteran and the prostitute, both figures of ill repute, operated powerfully in Weimar Germany’s cultural imaginary. Positioned on the periphery of society, they served a central symbolic role in representations of modern life. Doris may not descend into hard-core prostitution, but she turns briefly to streetwalking and aligns herself with the abject culture of begging for a living. If she feels superior to the beggars on the street, it is only because she uses her body to attract attention and desire rather than empathy and revulsion. Yet she is also supremely aware that only a few years separate the beggars from the prostitutes. Walking the streets during a time of prosperity, she sees “lots of men around selling matches and shoelaces — so many of them — and everywhere there are whores in the streets, and young men with starved voices,” and she makes sure to give “everyone” a token handout.

Keun’s compelling rendering of Berlin in the 1920s was inspired in part by Alfred Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz
(1929), a work that had created a literary sensation by turning the spotlight on convicts, prostitutes, and criminal lowlifes. Döblin met Keun at a reading in Cologne and encouraged her to write, emphasizing that her sharp powers of observation and narrative skills could lead to real literary prominence. Following Döblin’s example, along with that of Brecht, who had portrayed armies of beggars, prostitutes, and gangsters in his popular
Threepenny Opera
(1928), Keun turned her attention to giving a voice to those who had never had any real literary representation. While male authors had sought to ventriloquize female characters — Arthur Schnitzler’s
Fräulein Else
is perhaps the most notorious example — few women had engaged their literary skills to solving the problem of female representation in contemporary literature. Inspired by the example of Anita Loos’s
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1925), Keun set out to write the German answer to the bestselling novel from the United States.