Irmgard Keun enjoyed great public acclaim for her first two novels Gilgi, eine von uns [Gilgi, One of Us] (1931) and Das kunstseidene Mädchen [The Artificial Silk Girl] (1932) during the last few years of the Weimar Republic. In 1933, the Nazis banned both works, condemning them as “asphalt literature with anti-German tendencies”. At the beginning of 1936, Keun applied for admission to the Reichsschrifttumskammer so that she could officially work again and publish her writing. After she refused to comply with requests to make changes to a new novel, this attempt to come to a formal arrangement with the authorities in Nazi Germany failed once and for all. On 11 April 1936, she signed a contract with Dutch exile publisher Allert de Lange, then on 4 May, she travelled to the Belgian spa town of Ostend and joined the circle of exiled writers there. This is where she began her relationship with fellow exile Joseph Roth, which for a while had a positive impact on the productivity of them both. Together, they travelled through Europe and worked on literary texts.

In November 1936, Allert de Lange refused to publish Keun’s new novel Nach Mitternacht for fear of repercussions due to the politically sensitive content. It was therefore published by Amsterdam-based publisher Querido Verlag the following year. Keun, whose relationship with Roth ended in 1938, had meanwhile moved to Amsterdam, where she witnessed the German army’s invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. That summer, she returned to Germany under the name Charlotte Tralow and lived at her parents’ house in Cologne until 1945.

After the war, Irmgard Keun tried to build on her literary success from the Weimar period, worked as a journalist, and wrote radio texts and feature articles. In 1947, she published the anthology Bilder und Gedichte aus der Emigration [Pictures and Poems of Emigration]. A novel published in 1950 received little attention, and the books from her time in exile also found little favour with the public. In the last years of her life, she witnessed the rediscovery and reissue of her books before passing away in 1982.

Selected works:
Gilgi, eine von uns (Roman, 1931)
Das kunstseidene Mädchen (Roman, 1932)
Nach Mitternacht (Roman, 1937)
Kind aller Länder (Roman, 1938)
Bilder und Gedichte aus der Emigration (Sammlung, 1947)

Further reading:
Häntzschel, Hiltrud: Irmgard Keun. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2001.
Weidermann, Volker: Ostende 1936. Sommer der Freundschaft. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2014.