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The Artificial Silk Girl
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 135

The Artificial Silk Girl

Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was The Artificial Silk Girl. In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and des...

Gilgi, One of Us
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 166

Gilgi, One of Us

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2019-12-05
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  • Publisher: Penguin UK

A brilliant, bestselling feminist novel from Weimar Germany, from the author of Child of All Nations 'A formidable literary talent ... Sharp yet naïve, Gilgi is utterly human' Irish Times Gilgi knows where she's going in life: she's ambitious, focused and determined, even when her boss tries it on with her, even when her parents reveal a terrible secret on her twenty-first birthday. Then she meets the charming but feckless Martin and, for the first time, Gilgi finds herself bewilderingly and dangerously derailed. Irmgard Keun's electrifying debut was an instant sensation in Weimar Germany, with its frank, fearless exploration of sex, work and love. Translated by Geoff Wilkes 'How contemporary the novel feels, with its portrait of a woman fighting to maintain control over her life and her body' The New York Times

After Midnight
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 128

After Midnight

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2020-04-23
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  • Publisher: Penguin UK

Depicting a young woman's life in Nazi Germany, a masterpiece from the author of Child of All Nations 'I cannot think of anything else that conjures up so powerfully the atmosphere of a nation turned insane' Sunday Telegraph Nineteen-year-old Sanna just wants to drink her beer in peace, but that's difficult when Hitler has come to town and his motorcade is blocking the streets of Frankfurt. What's more, her best friend Gerti is in love with a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been blacklisted and her own aunt may denounce her to the authorities at any moment, as Germany teeters on the edge of the abyss. Written after she had fled the Nazi regime, Irmgard Keun's masterly novel captures the feverish hysteria and horror of the era with devastating perceptiveness and humour. Translated by Geoff Wilkes

After Midnight
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 87

After Midnight

Bad things happen in the dark... It's been a long night at Hap's Truck Stop & Roadside Diner. Young waitress Norma is counting the minutes until the end of another double shift, while her elderly boss Jean is busy baking the perfect apple pie. But all hell is about to break loose. A horribly injured stranger staggers into the diner. Believing he's the victim of a road accident, Norma and Jean rush to his aid. But miles from the nearest town and with the phone lines mysteriously down, their chances of saving him are looking slim. Then a second stranger appears, and suddenly it's clear that Norma and Jean aren't just fighting to save the dying man's life. They're fighting to save their own... After Midnight is a nerve-shredding short story from Malcolm Richards that will have you checking under the bed. Revised Edition: "After Midnight" was previously published under the title "Walking After Midnight".

Women in Weimar Fashion
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 254

Women in Weimar Fashion

New view of the crucial role of fashion discourse and practice in Weimar Germany and its significance for women.

Child of All Nations
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 168

Child of All Nations

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2009-01-29
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  • Publisher: Penguin UK

Kully knows she and her parents can't go back to Germany - her father's books are banned there. There might be a war so they roam through Europe, escaping from country to country as their visas expire, money runs out and hotel bills mount up.

The Artificial Silk Girl
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 149

The Artificial Silk Girl

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2019-03-28
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  • Publisher: Penguin UK

A hilarious, tragic novel about a would-be movie star in 1920s Berlin, from the author of Child of All Nations Doris is going to be a big star. Wearing a stolen fur coat and recently fired from her office job, she takes an all-night train to Berlin to make it in the movies. But what she encounters in the city is not fame and fortune, but gnawing hunger, seedy bars, and exploitative men - and as Doris sinks ever lower, she resorts to desperate measures to survive. Very funny and intensely moving, this is a dazzling portrait of roaring Berlin in the 1920s, and a poignant exploration of the doomed pursuit of fame and glamour. The Artificial Silk Girl was a huge bestseller in Weimar Germany before the Nazis banned it, and is today Keun's best-loved book in Germany. Funny, fresh and radical in its dissection of the limited options available to working women, it is a novel that speaks to our times.

The Undercurrents
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 401

The Undercurrents

Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities, and our histories. The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibl...

Women in the Metropolis
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 246

Women in the Metropolis

Bringing together the work of scholars in many disciplines, Women in the Metropolis provides a comprehensive introduction to women's experience of modernism and urbanization in Weimar Germany. It shows women as active participants in artistic, social, and political movements and documents the wide range of their responses to the multifaceted urban culture of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. Examining a variety of media ranging from scientific writings to literature and the visual arts, the authors trace gendered discourses as they developed to make sense of and regulate emerging new images of femininity. Besides treating classic films such as Metropolis and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, the articles discuss other forms of mass culture, including the fashion industry and the revue performances of Josephine Baker. Their emphasis on women's critical involvement in the construction of their own modernity illustrates the significance of the Weimar cultural experience and its relevance to contemporary gender, German, film, and cultural studies.

Ostend
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 178

Ostend

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2016-01-26
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  • Publisher: Pantheon

It’s the summer of 1936, and the writer Stefan Zweig is in crisis. His German publisher no longer wants him, his marriage is collapsing, and his house in Austria—searched by the police two years earlier—no longer feels like home. He’s been dreaming of Ostend, the Belgian beach town that is a paradise of promenades, parasols, and old friends. So he journeys there with his lover, Lotte Altmann, and reunites with fellow writer and semi-estranged close friend Joseph Roth, who is himself about to fall in love. For a moment, they create a fragile haven. But as Europe begins to crumble around them, the writers find themselves trapped on vacation, in exile, watching the world burn. In Ostend, Volker Weidermann lyrically recounts “the summer before the dark,” when a coterie of artists, intellectuals, drunks, revolutionaries, and madmen found themselves in limbo while Europe teetered on the edge of fascism and total war. Ostend is the true story of two of the twentieth century’s great writers, written with a novelist’s eye for pacing, chronology, and language—a dazzling work of historical nonfiction. (Translated from the German by Carol Brown Janeway)