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.

Then Cologne after the war. A world of money-making schemes and makeshift rooms in shattered buildings owned by somebody’s grandmother. The fur coats of the dead worn with the stink of mothballs and perspiration still on them. A world of cheap stockings and popular melodies, pickpockets and racketeers. Heirlooms stolen and trafficked among the wreckage. The rapidly passing shame of going through ashtrays. Memories of the POW camps. Social slumming and irons in the fire. Newspaper talk of currency reform and devaluation and economic miracle and lurid magazines full of second-hand Third Reich gossip (‘I was Hitler’s pest-control guy’). A world of ill-starred actresses and scrap-metal businesses.  Cognac and vermouth and gin and champagne thrown down the necks of journalists, writers, ex-Nazis, lion tamers, accordionists, Americans, bigamists and divorcees, disappointed lovers, young women and would-be murderers. Still the perpetual sound of the radio at the end of the world. A fairy story gone mad.

In Keun’s writing, there are no dead except the children who succumb to nameless conditions or the relatives killed by food poisoning or those who commit suicide. But everyone is dead. The taprooms teem with bodies smelling of decaying life. It is ugly and it is beautiful. Life goes on, and those who don’t are unloved and unmourned. It is impossible to be dead. It is beyond consideration. The past is so completely derelict that all wishes incline in other directions. It is all a lottery of tricks and trades, grand entrances and disappearing acts, songs and kisses. Only the truly dead are outspoken. But the Germany of the National Socialists no longer needs writers, because there’s no literature in Paradise.

Keun returned to Cologne long before it was safe to do so, and she only survived because the Daily Telegraph reported her suicide in Amsterdam in the late summer of 1940. But after then she became a ghost. A banished soul, a vague whiff of alcohol. All her belongings in one bag, then the psychiatric ward. Then gone, her second death in 1982.

When death is everywhere and nowhere all at once, grief has no object. When grief has no object, we risk going beyond melancholia towards a manic stage. Read your Freud. Keun is the great chronicler of the mania that transpires when grief is in want of an object. She is also, and in other words, the great chronicler of fascism.

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In Freud’s ‘Mourning sand Melancholia’, melancholy is distinguished from the normal feelings of grief experienced after the death of a loved one. Melancholia is the more painful and elusive psychological experience because the melancholic does not know what even if they know whom they have lost. Melancholy is characterised by a strangely absent sense of absence; the melancholic is absorbed by an enigma. Anguish turns in upon itself, converting sorrow into self-reproach. Here, Keun’s predicament is evocative, since it is also that of Walter Benjamin’s Germany—a nation with one eye always over its shoulder on the last war. Melancholics are aghast by images of their own emptiness, a pitiful game of self-discovery made impossible by the fact that there’s never anything to see.

But the story does not end there. Freud detects in melancholic low self-esteem a reprimand aimed at others. Because the appalling symptoms are manifestly not deserved. So it is a protest from the outset, and a form of resistance in the making. And yet, because melancholia is in want of an object, it takes aim everywhere and nowhere, all at once. This is why fascism can become its prime target.

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Fascism displays many characteristics which are the subject of perennial debate. But, today, as it continues to survive its own catastrophe—that of the mid-twentieth century—two perhaps rather surprising facets continue to flourish. Despite its blatant authoritarianism, fascism leads to an irreversible erosion of the authority principle. Look at Trump. It is a chaos of reason, a constantly unstable bartering of norms, a revelry of smash-and-grab politics and of course a mockery of law driven to the point of sheer tedium. Mussolini’s notorious delineation of fascism as ‘all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state’ gives the impression of something it is not: what he really meant was that fascism was, by definition, everything and nothing, the wellspring of an absolute—absolutist—relativism. Mussolini’s fascism is pure thought and action ungrounded by abstract principle: a conception of life that is intuitive and world-creating, not dutiful in any sense.

Despite its near-ludic obsession with control, then, fascism’s violence against authority risks an experience of desire which points towards the onset of psychosis.  This was already evident in the hyperproduction of antisemitic laws that characterised the later stages of the Third Reich, driving law to the limits of lawlessness. But what is the law of desire?  Read your Freud. The phobia that results from a lapse in the paternal function, from a weak father figure, is instructive. The subject in question lacks the necessary degree of prohibition vis-a-vis the object represented by the mother. In want of a bar, they risk a terrible drift towards psychotic experience wherein the subject-object relation itself begins to collapse. In these circumstances, phobic ‘objects’ stand in, provoking recoil and therefore simulating the effects of a certain separation that partially recuperates the situation. Trumpism is perhaps the most telling example of the ‘phobic’ paradigm, Trump himself emerging as a faux substitute, a spectacular shock replacement for the lack of authority which he also manifestly represents.

And yet something about the ‘everything-and-nothing’ of fascism, whether now or then, carries itself over into the precise character of manic protest, which takes aim everywhere and nowhere all at once.

*

It may be impossible to recuperate the (melancholic) loss for which fascism stands, not least because it isn’t a repressed shortcoming so much as a lack that never was, the absence of an absence. This impossible loss, which leads from melancholia to manic forms of life, must be survived rather than recovered. How, then, is one to live? How Irmgard Keun lives, or rather how her novels live. Here, the politics of ‘life’ is a story of lifedeath. (It’s also why Max Sebald was wrong in condemning Döblin on the grounds that his Lebenphilosophie was, in Sebald’s view, death-bound and therefore angled towards fascism rather than capable of its resistance.) Let’s take as an example The Artificial Silk Girl. Set in the last days of Weimar, it’s the diary of an eighteen-year-old woman, Doris, who trades office work for the theatre, treading an uncertain line between sexual freedom and prostitution. The daughter of an absent alcoholic father, she drifts through a world coming to an end and living its own ending:

And then we all went over to the Mazurka-Bar to Johnny Klotz. It was terrific… one guy was singing ‘Heil di rim Siegerkranz’, he was drunk. We got to talking with him, due to a bottle of Asbach we had on us… He told us that he had just pawned his iron cross for the 17^th time at a bar, so he could go on drinking, and this way a life-threatening mission was finally becoming worth something, though not much.  And we took him along to Johnny… And he said his life was over and that’s why things were just starting to get interesting… There was such hopelessness in the corners of his mouth, so I showered him with kisses because I felt sorry for him, which easily happens to me whenever I’m hammered. (36-37)

Doris steals a fur coat from the cloakroom of the dress circle which she sports like a luxuriant second skin, stitched into her second self as if it were a flayed impersonation of the divine –‘It spoke comfort to me, a guardian angel, protection from heaven’. Meanwhile, lovers and friends become living corpses, images lost in their own forms of appearance—’Hubert became a dead memory and wasn’t really sitting there alive, in front of me, and it was like looking at his photograph… And then I went with him. And I slept with a photograph’ (40-41).

Then a woman dies, her downward descent as much a game of snakes-and-ladders as our heroine’s near-celestial vision of stardom. Heaven and the underworld cross on the stairs:

Rannowsky from our building, who is a word I’m ashamed to put on paper, has been arrested! Because he almost killed one of his women and she reported him. And now she keeps passing us on the stairs and her name is Hulla and she has a wide sagging face and hair that’s been dyed yellow… And she wears cheap, tight-fitting wool jumpers that emphasise her body shape in a vulgar way. So she stops me on the staircase and starts talking to me… she comes from a terrible underworld that’s completely foreign to me. That’s how low you can sink. I was nice to her, because I was afraid of her and because nobody else is. I was a star compared to her. (80)

Poor Hulla meets her fate because in a moment of rage she sabotages Rannowky’s pet fish:

Hulla is dead. At the hand of Rannowsky. He got out of prison this morning. The main goldfish Lolo died because Hulla had retained a scar on her mouth from Rannowsky’s beating, and it will never go away—that’s what the doctor said. So she goes to the fish tank and takes out Lolo and puts him on the floor… That Lolo is lying on a piece of newspaper. She throws herself on the ground and screams: ‘Put him back in the water, bring him back to life, put him back in the water!’

I put him back in the water. His belly is up.

She says: ‘I didn’t want that!’

And the fish continued to swim belly up. Three others hit him with their snouts. The dead fish’s tummy was pale. And that overweight Hulla was kneeling on the floor praying…

And as I come upstairs, there’s lots of people there. And Rannowsky. And Hulla jumps out of the window, the moment he enters the room. (86-87)

In death, Hulla is in flight, caught between the up-above and the down-below, as adrift between the two as any angel may be. Between Hulla and a star, death is everywhere and nowhere at once. Like fascism itself, it is turned inside out by the absence that gives it form. It is the divine stood on its head or, rather, gone belly up. At the close of the novel, Doris performs what amounts to the same angelic high-wire act: ‘my eyes are dead with tears… but I have buoys of cork in my stomach. They won’t let me go down, will they?’ (143). Between Hulla and a star, one finds the politics of life lived amid fascist melancholia in its manic stage, where the overwhelming loss cannot be put in the ground, even if it can hardly survive above. When, in Keun’s earlier novel After Midnight, little Bertha collapses while singing a home-made anthem for Adolf Hitler—a grisly party-piece that sees the child fall off her stool in a paroxysm of fascist joy—the after-effect is just as topsy-turvy. Keun’s heroine, Sanna, declares: ‘I am afraid. Fear is rising around me, like rising water, up and up, never stopping. It’s like death by drowning’ (42). Up is down and down is up. Elation is a sinking feeling: a pure definition of anxiety, perhaps; and perhaps also the quintessence of Nazism, where a language of winning provides the content for forms based on loss. This feeling is the other side of the Lazarus coin, the repressed residue of the Phoenix which remains a neo-Nazi go-to, a part of the death cult. In another of Keun’s novels, Child of All Nations, the near-stateless infant narrator, adrift on a sea of European migrancy, exclaims: ‘Unfortunately, God made people in such a way that they have to live on land. I now secretly pray every night that in future people might be able to float in the water for years on end, or fly around in the air’ (31). But what is floating or flying, if not this anxiety writ large?

In Child of All Nations, Jeanne Moth—a sort of counterpart of Hulla, with ‘terribly wild dark-red hair’—is a maniac (‘She is restless, runs back and forth the whole time, and laughs and cries and talks. But once I saw her sitting on the beach, all mute and silent’ (109).) Her demise recalls Hullah’s, in that it does not seem to be a first death, if it is even that. ‘That evening in the hotel Jeanne is suddenly dead, because she wanted to be dead. I don’t know how she did it. I don’t think it’s at all a terrible thing, because what’s the point of living if you could just as well be dead?… Then all at once Jeanne Moth was alive again. The doctor came out of her room and told everyone about it. Pretty soon, she was running around again… I mean, Jeanne Moth wanted to be dead, and it didn’t work out in her case… which shows that it can’t be that simple’ (116-18). It feels less like a story of miraculous rebirth than a false report of death’s capacity to bring an end to anything. Take note: manic revolt thrives where we cannot draw the line, and it takes reckless aim at the ‘everywhere-and-nowhere’ that occasions it.

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Irmgard Keun, After Midnight (London: Penguin, 2020), translated by Anthea Bell
—————–, Child of All Nations (London: Penguin, 2008), translated by Michael Hofmann
—————–, Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart (London: Penguin, 2021), translated by Michael Hofmann
—————–, Gilgi, One of Us (London: Penguin, 2019), translated by Geoff Wilkes
—————–, The Artificial Silk Girl (London: Penguin, 2019), translated by Kathie von Ankum

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Simon Wortham is the author of a trilogy of fictional works published by MA Bibliotheque and has written widely on modern European philosophy and literature. His two most recent books are Robert Walser and the Politics of Neglect (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and Rereading Robert Walser: Criticism, Creativity, Correspondence (London: UCL Press, 2025). The latter is an open access title, free to read online, and includes his novella Bellelay, an excerpt from which was published in Minor Literature[s].