The Artificial Silk Girl
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
This enthralling tale of a “material girl” in 1930s Berlin is the masterpiece of a literary icon, rediscovered and restored to the same heights as such luminaries as Isherwood and Brecht.
In 1931 a young woman writer living in Germany penned her answer to Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the era of cinematic glamour: The Artificial Silk Girl. Though a Nazi censorship board banned Irmgard Keun’s work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies, the novel survived, as fresh and relevant today as the day it was written.
The Artificial Silk Girl is the story of Doris, beautiful and striving, who vows to write down all that happens to her as the star of her own life story. But instead of scripting what she hopes will be a quick rise to fame and fortune as either an actress or the mistress/wife of a wealthy man, she describes a slow descent into near prostitution and homelessness. Prewar Berlin is not the dazzling and exciting city of promise it seems; Doris unwittingly reveals a bleak, seamy urban landscape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
First published in 1932, this unusual novel might well have been subtitled "Social Climbing Through Bed-Hopping in the Last Days of the Weimar Republic." Initially a commercial success, it was soon banned by the Nazis for the racy, irreverent musings of its narrator, Doris, an office worker who decides that her best chance of improving her lot is to exercise her considerable libido as she tries to find a rich Mr. Right. Her strategy succeeds for brief periods, but Doris also goes through several down-at-the-heels phases as her various affairs come apart; at a particularly perilous moment, she is almost forced into prostitution. Her most consistent candidate for true love is a man named Hubert, who wanders in and out of her life. When he disappears, Doris takes a stab at life in the theater before a problematic affair ends that venture. Doris's frank, outrageous comments on the foibles of her various suitors keep things entertaining until the one-note romantic plot begins to wear thin. Readers may be disappointed that Keun (1905-1982) has little to offer on the politics of the era, save for her portrayal of a brief date in which Doris gets rejected when she pretends to be Jewish. That lacuna aside, this is an illuminating look at the much-mythologized social and sexual mores of Weimar Germany.
