Anyone who has read her other books (Gilgi, One of Us; The Artificial Silk Girl; After Midnight; and Child of All Nations) will know Irmgard Keun (1905–82) to be an original: a witty, fearless, and unpredictable writer of the Weimar and exile periods. The last novel she published, Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart, is a book from a unique circumstance, an underlit time, and an important place: 1950, the year after the division of Germany (until then under the jurisdiction of the four Allied powers, Russia, France, Britain, and the United States) was made official and permanent, with the proclamation of the two rival nations of West and East Germany (the former Russian sector). As Keun puts it, with her typical, unmistakeable dryness, “Our former unlamented German dictatorship has, in the way of lower life-forms, procreated by simple fission, and is now called democracy.” Imagine a novel about the very early days of the Wirtschaftswunder by the wise cynic and author of Candide, Voltaire, and you have Ferdinand, the Man with the Kind Heart.
Ferdinand is a book where things have been codified or heralded or announced—the rival republics, the oft-invoked currency reform, the beginnings of prosperity—but are yet to happen properly. It is a book of ironic healing, false growth, and improvised hopes; where a stupidly contrived tabloid unreality offers distraction to the plenty seeking it (“Man seeks divorce after wife abandons him in bowl of unsalted spinach”); a cocktail of fear and avidity and nosiness and absurdity; of “New Look,” and repurposed coats, and kerchiefs for hats, and where the whole idea of genders and hierarchies and careers and households is yet to be re-established. Where all the characters—and the author too, one might guess—were chancers, running around in a state of shock lit by flashbacks and addled by official optimism. “He informed me that he had changed horses and was now a law student.” Conditions are still soft, mutable, adaptive, evolving. A social-Darwinian moment for the upwardly mobile fish to acquire legs. The endearingly slow Ferdinand, getting his marching orders, is apologetically rejected as “a man for abnormal times.”
But full legality, normality, remain a ways off. Production and consumption are both in their infancy. No one here follows a useful or a respectable calling. The atmosphere remains conditioned by crime and the memory of crime: “Insatiable and obsessed, my forget-me-not-blue mother-in-law went on the prowl, and snaffled among other things a sewing machine, various typewriters, four rugs, seventeen eggcups, a gilt frame, a bombproof door, a poultry cage, and a pompous drawing-room painting depicting a voluptuous woman lying prone in pink, puffy nudity, a blue moth teetering on the end of her pink index finger, and the whole thing somehow casual.” No one in this book lives in a house, has a regular family, a job, a budget, a plan. (Or else they have too many plans.) They are urgent and primitive in their biological needs, which are principally for terrible drink, even worse cigarettes, and one another. Where the Victorian novel aspires to stability and marriage, Ferdinand deals in the provisional, in pashes and penury. It is an anti-romance (our hero finally succeeds in shaking off his fiancée, and lands up in his sleeping mother’s hotel bedroom, with her alert dachshund and two whimsically adopted black children, referred to as Negroes, but that was the style of the fifties, and there’s not the least malice in Keun, never mind anything like racist feeling) and an anti-Entwicklungsroman (he ends, our unhappy veteran of war and peace, having learned little or nothing, if anything rather behind where he began). “I feel so deep-frozen,” he muses, and we with him, “I wonder if I’ll ever thaw out in this life.” The moment it is all set in, though, is precious and fleeting, the cultural equivalent of the predawn evoked in the words of Ferdinand’s cousin Johanna, the great free spirit of the book. “Look at that, Ferdinand—see the sky on fire! It’s the sunrise. In an hour’s time the first bailiff will be here.”
—M. H.