Irmgard Keun was a major novelist of Weimar and Nazi Germany. Three of her first four novels –
Gilgi, eine von uns[
Gilgi, One of Us, 1931],
Das kunstseidene Mädchen[
The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932], and
Nach Mitternacht[
After Midnight, 1937] – were immediate critical and popular successes and were translated into half a dozen languages. All three were filmed. Since Keun saw her talent and vocation in contemporaneous fiction (
Zeitroman)
with a satirical bent, her career, like that of many other German writers, suffered from the political crises between the 1930s and 1950s. She continued to publish four more novels as well as many feuilleton pieces for newspapers and radio, but had to wait until the 1970s for rediscovery as an important modernist author. Her main subject was city…
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Citation: Argyle, Gisela. "Irmgard Keun". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 September 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12731, accessed 21 November 2024.]
