Negotiating the past in Weimar culture: Neue Sachlichkeit and Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen

Maxey, Karin A.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/16176 Copy

Description

Title

Negotiating the past in Weimar culture: Neue Sachlichkeit and Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen

Author(s)

Maxey, Karin A.

Issue Date

2010-05-19T18:39:52Z

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Yildiz, Yasemin

Department of Study

Germanic Languages & Lit

Discipline

German

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

M.A.

Degree Level

Thesis

Keyword(s)

• Irmgard Keun
• Weimar Republic
• Das kunstseidene Mädchen
• memory studies
• negotiation of the past
• German literature
• Weimar literature
• 20th-century German literature
• Karin Maxey

Abstract

Irmgard Keun’s 1932 novel Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl) exposes many of the social and cultural issues existing in the Weimar Republic, such as unemployment, the metropolis and mass culture, modernity, and the Neue Frau (New Woman). During this time, Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was one of the dominant literary and artistic movements, encouraging rational, unsentimental reporting of the facts, free of ornamentation or embellishments. A reaction to the illusions that lured Germany into World War I, New Objectivity focused primarily on the present, a problem for a country that needed to reconcile the effects of a destructive war. The past rarely arises as a topic of interest in New Objectivity literature, in contrast to the period after World War II when the past and memory were important topics in German literature, such as Holocaust studies. My thesis seeks to answer the question of how New Objectivity negotiates the past by examining examples of historical and personal memory within Keun’s novel and analyzing the different ways in which characters relate to their past. The protagonist and first-person narrator of the novel, Doris, for example, records her present in a diary that also functions as a means of reconciling generational differences with her parents. Ignoring her lack of education and working-class origins, Doris’s primary goal is directed at the future as she aspires to become a Glanz, a shining brilliance. During the course of the novel, however, she also encounters individuals who nostalgically long for the Wilhelmine Empire, a world apart from the rapidly modernizing Weimar Republic. While Keun does not issue a verdict on how to cope with the past, she does in fact acknowledge its importance in Germany’s current definition of itself by incorporating it into the themes of Das kunstseidene Mädchen.

Graduation Semester

2010-5

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/16176

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Copyright 2010 Karin A. Maxey

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