![]() ![]() ![]() Though, like her narrator Sanna, Keun (The Artificial Silk Girl) had recently fled Nazi Germany when she wrote this slim volume, readers should resist conflating Keun's mature prose with the character's pitch-perfect naivet. Published in America for the first time, suspicion and betrayal permeate social and romantic life in this finely wrought account of civilian life in 1930's Frankfurt. After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered anew. It is full of humor and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare. Yet even as it exposes human folly, the book exudes a hopeful humanism. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions, and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel. ![]() In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite, and devastating book. ![]() Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's Jewish lover, a blockade cuts off the girls' path-it is the Fürher in a motorcade procession, and the crowd goes mad striving to catch a glimpse of Hitler's raised "empty hand." Then the parade is over, and in the long hours after midnight Sanna and Gerti will face betrayal, death, and the heartbreaking reality of being young in an era devoid of innocence or romance. Sanna and her ravishing friend Gerti would rather speak of love than politics, but in 1930s Frankfurt, politics cannot be escaped-even in the lady's bathroom. ![]()
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