A GERMAN WAR CLASSIC FROM SINGAPORE

This gem of a book about twenty-four hours in Hitler's Germany turned up in a quaint bookstore in the historic district of Singapore.

I picked a German work this week titled After Midnight by the late Imgard Keun. I bought the title in 2021 at Littered With Books, an independent bookstore on Duxton Road, in one of the old historic neighborhoods of Singapore littered with terrific restaurants.

Typically, bookstores in most places are located in historic neighborhoods with a lot of foot traffic. And just as I’d imagined, as I trudged down from the bus stop, the shophouses in Tanjong Pagar area rose into view and one of the shophouses had been converted into this quaint and wonderfully curated shop selling books.

I couldn’t find my pictures of Littered With Books but I located a typical Singapore road from the historic district with shophouses. The facades of most of these old shophouses are so beautifully renovated and maintained.

While looking up stories about this author, I found an article about her in a more recent issue of the Smithsonian magazine. I came upon it after I finished the novel, and I began to recognize the parallels to Keun’s own predicament in the stories of several key characters in the novel.

“Once an acclaimed German novelist, the then 31-year-old Keun had been living the life of an exile in either France or the Netherlands since 1936. Three years earlier the Nazis had condemned her enormously popular recent novels, which dealt with subjects like independent women in Berlin’s seedy underworld, as “anti-German.” Keun was in Holland in 1940 when the fascists began their occupation of the Netherlands. With apparently nowhere left to turn, she took her own life—or so a British newspaper reported in August of the same year.”

~~~ Excerpt from The Smithsonian Magazine. “The Extraordinary Disappearing Act of a Novelist Banned by the Nazis”, published on January 26, 2021, by Arvind Dilawar

Keun did not take her own life. She went into hiding in the Netherlands and then later, in Germany. In one of her novels, The Artificial Silk Girl—blacklisted and banned during the Third Reich—Keun tells the story of a young woman in contemporary Berlin who resorts to prostitution and theft on her quest to become a cabaret star.

After Midnight is one of a collection of notable German fiction written around World War II. It was translated into English by the late Anthea Bell, who, I realized only today, opened up a world of literature to English readers, translating writers from Sigmund Freud to Cornelia Funke. Bell is famous for her translations of The Adventures of Asterix, a bande dessinée comic book series. (A huge thank you to author Kamini Dandapani for alerting me to this fact!).

While the novel depicts aspects of the lives of everyday people during the early years of the Nazi regime, it centers around one day in the narrator’s life. It leads us into the mind of a 19-year-old narrator named Sanna whose stepbrother and novelist Algin is in trouble when Hitler’s men assume command. When Algin starts courting trouble, his father chooses to disparage his work and stops displaying it prominently in the pub he runs.

Algin’s book is not on the little table by the counter anymore, because the National Socialists put in on a black list. Its trouble is that it’s demoralizing and offends against the basic will for reconstruction of the Third Reich. That’s what they said in the Nazi newspaper in Koblenz. My father wasn’t a National Socialist to start with but he was all for a basic will for reconstruction.

Also, he had to think of his customers, so he hung a picture of the Führer over the settle instead of the framed article about Algin.

Algin’s fortunes follow Imgard Keun’s own writing trajectory closely. During the Third Reich, any writer or journalist who did not toe the line of those in command was blacklisted. In the novel, we see Algin’s life being destroyed by the system. Blunting a writer’s pen is tantamount to injecting a toxin that causes gangrene. Ultimately, the rot must spread out through the rest of the body.. We watch the unraveling of Algin’s marriage. He sinks into depression and takes refuge in alcohol.

When Algin was first famous he thought he’d go up in the world a bit, and he did, and now it’s a burden to him, one he can’t shake off. Since the new government banned one of Algin’s books, he has to be scrupulously careful what he writes, and he doesn’t earn much money anymore. His entire life, his whole working day from morning to night, is spent making enough to pay for his apartment and the furniture.

Bellevue Palace in Berlin. Located in Berlin's Tiergarten district, it has been the official residence of the President of Germany since 1994. The schloss is situated on the banks of the Spree river, near the Berlin Victory Column.

If Algin chose to fly high, all Sanna wants is a simple life—to laugh, drink beer and find a worthy husband in Cologne where she has been living. Circumstances force her, however, to move to Frankfurt to live with Algin and his wife. While living with her aunt, she sees how the older woman is envious of how Sanna is making her son Franz confident while simultaneously making her lose her motherly grip on him. Aunt Adelheid seeks revenge by reporting her to the Gestapo for “bad-mouthing the Führer and the Nazi Party”.

This Gestapo room seems to be a positive place of pilgrimage. Mothers are informing on their daughters-in-law, daughters on their fathers-in-law, brothers on their sisters, sisters on their brothers, friends on their friends, drinking companions on their drinking companions, neighbors on their neighbors. And the typewriters go clatter, clatter, clatter, all the statements are taken down, all the informers are treated well and kindly. Now and then, mothers whose sons have disappeared turn up, wives whose husbands have disappeared, sisters whose brothers have disappeared, children whose parents have disappeared, friends whose friends have disappeared. People making these inquiries are not so well and kindly treated as the informers…

Overnight, Sanna manages to make Franz understand that she must leave his mother’s home if she is to stay alive. What awaits her in Frankfurt in Algin’s home is not that much more comforting, especially in a nation where no one trusts anyone anymore. By the time we reach the end, we are in shock. Heini, the journalist whose views have been polluted by the ruling party simply cannot live with himself.

After Midnight is an intense piece of work, one that is vexing in parts because we don’t know everything that has happened in the past. The whole story is craftily woven together to build suspense and heighten pathos At 138 pages, it’s a riveting read that feels even more powerful because of the way it’s structured and paced. It’s also riddled with brilliant satirical passages.

“The Stürmer writes that they’re children of the Devil. Now the Devil may take on all sorts of shapes. But I can find him out with my rod! There are some Jews who don’t look as if they are Jews—and there are some Christians who don’t look as if they are Christians. I can find them all out with my rod. I take it in my hand and ride in a tram with it, or walk down the street. I touch people’s backs with my rod, and if it jerks, that person is a Jew.”

While reading Keun’s work, I was reminded of the wit and humor of Ludovic Bruckstein, a Romanian-born Israeli writer whose tales lay out the horrors of the holocaust as it affects a town called Sighet in northwestern Romania. In both works of fiction we see the ways in which an ordinary day can be yanked from right under our noses by the world outside. Both writers are masterful at sketching eccentric characters going about their daily lives. While telling us stories of the worst of human suffering, they don’t ever forget to hone in on the most trifling moments in the lives of human beings, moments when we want to chuckle even as we blink away a tear.