Like Virginia Woolf, Gilgi recognizes the need for a room - and a typewriter - of her own. There are more roving hands and wounded male egos at the carnival parties in Gilgi’s native Cologne. She concocts a plan to divert his attentions onto her more glamorous friend Olga, who will be able to shake him off without risk to her career. In the meantime Gilgi’s boss at the hosiery company is showing an unhealthy interest in his young typist. Gilgi becomes painfully aware of how much she owes to the circumstances in which she was raised. One candidate is an indigent seamstress, another the then-teenage daughter of a wealthy family. On her 21st birthday the couple reveal to her that she was adopted, setting her on a search for her birth mother. The novel’s protagonist, an office girl in a company that makes hosiery, lives at home with her middlebrow parents. The specter of Nazism stays on the periphery of “Gilgi” like a weather front darkening distant skies.

It’s impossible to trace the parallels between our time and those interwar years without thinking of what came next: a vicious backlash against female freedom and ruthless suppression of the open society that had made it possible. But they’re sketched with a light hand: This is a beach-worthy read with a social conscience.Ī female Times reviewer in 1932, praising the novel’s “wholesome freshness,” noted that “countless hard-working, industrious, healthy young girls recognized themselves in the heroine.” I suspect many members of our #MeToo generation will do so as well. Gilgi’s experiences of workplace harassment, her scruples about privilege and her unease with the narcotic effects of romantic love are all colored by Keun’s left-leaning politics. When I read “Gilgi” I was struck by how contemporary the novel feels, with its portrait of a woman fighting to maintain control over her life and her body in a politically polarized society. From Wikipedia I learned that “Gilgi” was the first novel by a writer named Irmgard Keun (1905-82), who had been the It Girl of the German literary scene in the final years of the Weimar Republic. She had recently fallen in love with my grandfather Hermann and was summoning the courage to divorce her husband.

I was curious for any glimpse into my grandmother’s mind during this chapter of her life when she was an expressionist dancer in Hamburg and sported boyish haircuts and berets. “Such courage!” Käthe wrote, of the character Gilgi.

I first came across the name “Gilgi” on a page of my grandmother Käthe’s diary from 1932, tucked between mentions of “Shanghai Express” with Marlene Dietrich and a performance by the Jewish cabaret star Dela Lipinskaja.

After Midnight by Irmgard Keun