Manic joy: Irmgard Keun and the politics of life under/over fascism

What does anybody know about Irmgard Keun? Failed actress, encouraged by Alfred Döblin to write. A darling of Weimar, her first novel Gilgi a sensation, turned into a film. Falsely accused of plagiarism for her second. Banned by the Nazis. Went into exile in Belgium and the Netherlands from the mid-1930s onwards, having tried to sue the German government for loss of earnings. Told tales of enthusiastic Hitlerians, ambitious informants bent on settling scores, and thick-set SA men drinking beer and looking over their shoulders. Of the eating establishments once favoured by Jews, now frequented only by those who wished to look Aryan and abandoned by those afraid of being taken for Jewish. Of authors making compromises to make ends meet while their aunts installed pictures of the Führer above the mantelpiece. Meanwhile, people were being hauled off to jail and there were loudspeakers in the street. The Horst Wessel Song (‘The Flag Raised High’) came on the radio while in the cafés spinsters ate apple tart with cream, and everybody stood up because you never knew who might be watching. The radio like some bipolar super-ego, terrorising the German people with exorbitant praise and bottomless threats in equal measure. Everyone already on the run, the cities already a vast camp.