let me tell you, Herr Brenner, a woman should never wear artificial silk when she's with a man.  It wrinkles too quickly, and what are you going to look like after seven real kisses?  Only pure silk, I say - and music - "

Mini-Germanathon Book 3 is Irmgard Keun's one-time bestseller of 1932 - the tale of Doris in the dying days of the Weimar Republic in general, Berlin in particular.    Having stolen a fur-coat that makes her feel like a film-star,  she flees to Berlin, the same decadent cabaret of a place as portrayed by Christopher Isherwood.  Unable to achieve the transition from bit-part actress to international superstar, she ricochets from man to man living from handouts and charity, one step away from walking the streets for a living and unable to see the crassness and superficiality of her life.  Her(r) Berlin is anything but golden and glorious.

Her life ebbs and flows.  There are good moments. There are bad.  The text, Doris's notebook, reflects this.  The literary highlight being the night she takes a blind WWI veteran out on the town.   Her words describing the city she inhabits.  Her blind companion wanting only to know if there are stars.  The truth being:  occasionally there's half a star coming out but it can't compete with the neon lights and all that buzz around us.  As the evening progresses, Doris forced to recognise the truth  All the people are in a hurry - and sometimes they look pale under those lights, then the girls' dresses look like they're not paid off yet and the men can't really afford the wine - is nobody really happy?  Now it's all getting dark.  Where is my shiny Berlin?

And this is where things go awry.  Because Doris, displaying a lack of intelligence that leaves me with little patience, chooses to live in the same superficial vein for the second half of the novel.  Life has further cruel lessons to teach her (including unreciprocated love) but she seems insistent on not listening and not learning.  Her existence merely repeating the same mistakes, the same montonous loop. 

Putting aside my antipathy to Doris and to the style of the narrative - the present continuous presenting a continuous bore - the novel works better as a commentary of life as it was led at the time.  Written in 1931 with no prescient knowledge of the cataclysm to follow,  Doris's unknowing befuddlement at gratuitous thuggery erupting from nowhere reflecting the majority of the German population caught up in events they understood only too late.

There are round oranges and cheese and meat on the buffet. 

And then Else's shoulder slides away from under me and there's noise - shoes, lots of shoes were comng - the girls were screaming and throwing the windows open.  Schanewsky's eyes were looking softly at me from the corner - the room burst with ten blond windbreakers - they are their enemies and again it's got something to do with politics.  And they threw themselves at the buffet and under that kitchen lighting they looked pale and starved and they threw the oranges on the floor and ate all the sausages.  And made a tired ruckus.  And stuffed down all the sausages.  And then they left.  What was that all about?

Although effective as a piece of social commentary, I found the whole thing yawnsworthy and quite frequently sleep-inducing, becoming alert only on reading the translator's note and Maria Tatar's introduction (the latter read only on completing the work ...) Kathie von Akum, who translated Keun's original in 2002, maintains that Doris is the antecedent of modern-day Bridget Jones, Carrie Bradshaws and Rebecca Bloomswood.  (Well yes, but the modern counterparts are, at times, belly-laugh funny ....).  Maria Tatar's introduction quite illuminating with regard to the Germanic literary antecedents, many of which languish in my TBR including  Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and Brecht's Threepenny Opera.  Fortunately not Schnitzler's brilliant Fräulein Else, which, while written by a man, is far more succinct and involving than Irmgard Keun's effort.

Irmgard Keun was the partner of novelist Joseph Roth for the last few years of his life: I've only dabbled in Roth with his novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker, but the testimonies of Susan Hill and dovegreyreader promise much more pleasure to be had from him yet (and dgr has already mentioned Irmgard Keun on this very site). Of course, a romantic connection with a fine writer doesn't mean that Keun's book will be good too: it must be just a coincidence, then.

Child of All Nations (1938) on the face of it sounds like pretty uninspiring stuff: a family flee Nazi Germany and seek peace elsewhere in Europe. Heard it all before. But what sets Keun's novel apart is the uniquely charming voice of Kully, the nine-year-old narrator.

The danger of a child narrator is that the author can make it too cute, too disingenuous, or two-dimensional. Fortunately Kully is none of these things, but gets her point across:

When I was in Germany, before, I did go to school, and that's where I learned to read and write. Then my father didn't want to be in Germany any more, because the government had locked up friends of his, and because he couldn't write or say the things he wanted to write and say. I wonder what the point is of children in Germany still having to learn to read and write?

Now her father is away raising money to enable them to continue their journey, and Kully and her mother are in Amsterdam, trying to stave off the day when they have to pay their hotel bills ("I get funny looks from hotel managers, but that's not because I'm naughty; it's the fault of my father ... the waiters no longer brandish their napkins in that jolly way; instead they flick them at our table. Mama says they do it to clear the crumbs away, but it looks to me more like what you do to keep away pesky cats that have their eyes on the roast").

Kully recounts their journeys across Germany, the Netherlands and France, with Keun meanwhile probing gently at the major issues surrounding the story. Reading it in the comfortably informed 21st century, it's easy to forget that Child of All Nations was written when the worst of the Nazi terror was yet to come: this makes it seem both prescient and retrospectively wise. There is a postmodern sort of dramatic irony in operation: not only does the reader know more than the narrator, the reader knows more than the author. On the subject of contemporary politics Kully's father has this to say:

'As for fear of God? Why? Why not trust in God? I'd rather my little girl worshipped matchboxes or liqueur glasses than that she be afraid of God. Everything that's wrong in the world begins with fear. All that mess in Germany could only result because the people there have lived in fear for ever. ... First a father demands that his child be afraid of him. Then there's school and fear of the teacher, fear of God at church, fear of military or other superiors, fear of the police, fear of life, fear of death. Finally, the people are so crippled and warped by fear that they elect a government that they can serve in fear. Not content with that, when they see other people who are not set on living in fear, the get angry, and try in their turn to make them afraid. First of all they make God into a kind of dictator, and now they don't need Him any more, because they've come up with a better dictator themselves.'

Child of All Nations is very funny too, from the authorial distance from her child narrator which enables Keun to invoke some witty irony, to Kully's father's bold way of trying to persuade people, and in particular women (all of whom, he feels, are susceptible to his charms). Here I saw reflections of Roth's Holy Drinker Andreas, and his doomed attempts to stave off the loss of his money.

The one disappointment is the ending, or more accurately the last leg of the family's journey. It damages the scale of the drama, and (as Hofmann acknowledges in his afterword) "breaks the claustrophobia of the book." But this doesn't matter too much - Child of All Nations is all about the journey, not the destination, and that is a very fine experience indeed.