There is a short anecdote, told in the singing, joyous dialect of Köln locals, of a woman who decides to protect her husband from his own happy-go-lucky approach to life by getting his beer into their home rather than letting him go to the pub and say something silly by mistake that will lead an envious person to call the Gestapo.
You could live in the hell of your solitary self, locked into an insane world of denunciation and profit-driven deceit, always aware that the world is too dangerous to frequent openly. The story, written in 1937, told from the perspective of a young girl trying to navigate the totalitarian system that her home has turned into, is naively showing the choices that were left, once the Nazis had established their reign of terror. This is my second book by Irmgard Keun, and I have to say I am shocked it took me so long to discover her incredible power to tell the story of the midnight that fell over Germany in the 1930s - which eventually forced her first into exile and then into hiding, only to be forgotten as a relic of a time gone by after 1945, when the former Nazis established themselves as guardians of morality and dutiful propriety and the emancipated women's tales of the early 30s were not considered interesting or uplifting lecture. After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered. It is full of humor and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare. Yet, even as it exposes human folly, the book exudes a hopeful humanism. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions, and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel.
In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite, and devastating book. Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's Jewish lover, a blockade cuts off the girls' path - it is the Fürher in a motorcade procession, and the crowd goes mad striving to catch a glimpse of Hitler's raised "empty hand." Then the parade is over, and in the long hours after midnight Sanna and Gerti will face betrayal, death, and the heartbreaking reality of being young in an era devoid of innocence or romance.
Sanna and her ravishing friend Gerti would rather speak of love than politics, but in 1930s Frankfurt, politics cannot be escaped - even in the lady's bathroom.
0 kommentar(er)
