The Artificial Silk Girl

"My selection of books is highly subjective, partly because I’m really interested in subjectivity as a historical phenomenon, but also because I felt I should highlight a couple of books that are probably lesser known to a general readership in the English-speaking world. I could have obviously chosen Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin in order to talk about the art and cabaret scene of the early 1930s. But I picked this one, first of all, because I think it’s important that we have at least one important contemporary female author on the list, and also because of the subjects that are discussed in the novel. Keun is from Charlottenburg, the part of Berlin that I am from. I walked past the plaque marking the home she lived in as a child many times when I was a teenager, which sparked my interest in her writing at an early age. She became one of the most significant female authors of the late Weimar period, a very prominent representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit —the New Sobriety—style in literature. Her books were commercially successful as well. This particular novel was published in 1932. The protagonist is Doris, an eighteen-year old woman from a small town who wants to be famous and make it in the movie industry, in the big smoke. It’s worth bearing in mind that the Ufa Studios in Babelsberg, just outside of Berlin, were one of the major hubs of the international film industry in the 1920s and early 1930s. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis was produced there and so was The Blue Angel that catapulted Marlene Dietrich to fame. That’s the historical backdrop to the story. “In some ways, Weimar is the culminating point of classical modernity” Doris arrives in Berlin on an overnight train wearing a stolen fur coat, with high expectations for a great career. But she finds out that all the supposed glamour of late-1920s Berlin is not quite what it seems. She doesn’t find fame and fortune, but basically encounters lots of seedy, exploitative characters. She works in seedy bars and has affairs with men who offer her money because success is not really materialising. This is, ultimately, a tragic novel that deals with crushed hopes and expectations, but also a really good corrective to the slightly cliché-ed image that emerges from reading about the Roaring Twenties in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin . I think that would be a spoiler. I should have said: there are obviously other important books written by female authors in that time period. I was quite tempted to nominate Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel for various reasons. Baum, originally from Austria, was one of the most widely read female fictional authors in Germany, but also had a major international career in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ten of her novels became Hollywood movies or Broadway musicals. Grand Hotel is probably the most widely known of them and offers an excellent take on a broken society. It is set in the Grand Hotel in Berlin during the Golden Twenties, which turn out to be less than golden in reality. The novel revolves around people working in the hotel and their guests. You have various characters that represent different sections of society and behind the glamorous façade of the hotel, they all turn out to be psychologically damaged. It is very critical of modern society and written in a very elegant way. The novel was published in 1929. The film came out in 1932. There’s a real flourishing of literature in the late twenties, early thirties."