The Artificial Silk Girl

The Artificial Silk Girl

In 1931, a young woman writer, living in Germany, penned her answer to Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the era of cinematic glamour. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the same tradition as Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertoldt Brecht's Three Penny Opera. Like Isherwood and Brecht, Keun revealed the dark underside of Berlin's "golden twenties" with both empathy and honesty. Unfortunately, a Nazi censorship board banned Keun's work in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies of , The Artificial Silk Girl. Only one English translation was published in Great Britain, before the book disappeared in the chaos of the ensuing war. Today, more than seven decades later, a new translation is about to bring this lost classic to light once more.At the beginning of The Artificial Silk Girl, Doris vows to write down all that happens to her-not as a mere diarist, but as the glamorous star of her own life-story. "I want to write like a movie," she declares. But, instead of scripting what she hopes will be a quick rise to fame and fortune as either an actress, or as the mistress/wife of a wealthy man, Doris describes a slow descent into near prostitution and homelessness. She becomes the cinematic lens through which we see pre-war Berlin. It is not the dazzling and exciting city of promise it seems to be on the surface; Doris unwittingly shows us a bleak, seamy urban landscape. In the words of another character in the novel, "the city is sick." It is "sick" with intolerance, cruelty, and apathy