After a defiant and doomed (as she was well aware) lawsuit against The Gestapo for lost earnings, Keun was forced into exile, and promptly divorced by her Nazi-sympathizing husband. They quickly became bestsellers, but their success was short-lived-dubbed “anti-German” by the Nazis, they were both blacklisted. These daring, provocative stories portrayed young women shedding conventional gender roles and adopting more modern and urban attitudes towards love and life. In 1931, at the age of 26, Keun burst into the German literary scene with the novels Gilgi and The Artificial Silk Girl. Only at the very end of her life, after an article article in Stern, did Germany realize Keun’s true literary importance as one of the country’s most stylish, groundbreaking, and morally courageous authors. Everyone had forgotten her brilliant, heartbreaking books about the Nazi regime, or her death-defying acts of political bravery. Everyone had forgotten her wildly bestselling, radically feminist novels of the Weimar Republic. After being discharged in 1972 she lived an impoverished existence in a small studio apartment. the unsinkable Irmgard Keun » MobyLivesīlacklisted, exiled, mistreated, forgotten… the unsinkable Irmgard Keunįor six years late in her life, the German author Irmgard Keun lived in the psychiatric ward in a hospital in Bonn. Blacklisted, exiled, mistreated, forgotten.
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