Child of All Nations – Irmgard Keun (1938)

Translated from the German by Michael Hoffman

My first review for #witmonth is Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun – she is probably best known for her novel The Artificial Silk Girl (1932) which I read a couple of years ago.

Kully is the memorable child narrator of this novel – which portrays the displacement of a family who have left Germany in the 1930s, to escape the Nazis, and whose fate is to now wander Europe as visa after visa expires. Kully and her parents live their lives moving from country to country staying in a series of hotels, struggling to pay the bills. Kully’s father is a writer, and they seem eternally hopeful of money that is owed to them somewhere or other, or money which might come to them when his new book is published. There is a lovable, precocity to Kully – who is still very much a child, despite this new way of living – and the fact she has no one to play with.

“When I was in Germany, before, I did go to school, and that’s where I learned to read and write. Then my father didn’t want to be in Germany anymore, because the government had locked up friends of his, and because he couldn’t write or say the things he wanted to write and say. I wonder what the point is of children in Germany still having to learn to read and write?”

There is so much for Kully to learn about in this new way of life – the eternal problem of passports and visas, and how to act in hotels. As the novel opens Kully and her mother are alone, as Kully’s father has gone to Warsaw. It won’t be long before they are all on the move again. One hotel giving way to the next on a journey around Europe with no visible end. In the hotels Kully tries to make friends with the maids, she gets stamps from the maître d’ which she saves – she is allowed to press the buttons in the lifts – when they take the lift – as sometimes they dare not as they can’t afford to tip the lift man. Sometimes they can’t afford to go to the restaurant so hide in the room that Kully shares with her mother and her pet tortoises – later she buys some guinea pigs that escape under the wardrobe. The maître d’ stops giving Kully stamps soon enough and it’s obvious they are regarded with suspicion by hotel staff, so have to keep a low profile. When her father sends Kully a parcel for her birthday, there is duty to pay on it which she and her mother don’t have, so Kully never does find out what is in her parcel.

“Above all, I need to learn what a visa is. We have German passports, which the police gave us in Frankfurt. A passport is a little booklet with stamps in. Basically, it’s to prove that you’re alive. If you lose your passport, then as far as the whole world is concerned you might as well have died. You’re not allowed to go to any more countries.”

Through Kully’s wonderfully, innocent, wide eyed view of the world we understand the stresses and strains her parents are living under. An existence with no security, where money, the earning of it, the spending of it the saving of it becomes as vital as breathing. Kully’s father is a charming, rather hopeless man, whose optimism that all will be well waxes and wains with their changing fortunes. Kully’s mother has to try and get an advance from one of her husband’s publishers, pretending she has forgotten to bring the new manuscript with her each time they meet – a manuscript which in reality doesn’t exist yet. Kully’s mother is clearly depressed, struggling to cope with the unending struggle for money and the need to keep moving, she is a much more shadowy figure in this novel than her husband.

“Sometimes my father loves us, and sometimes he doesn’t. When he doesn’t, we can’t do anything about it, my mother and me. Nothing is any good when he doesn’t love us. Then we’re not allowed to cry in his presence or laugh, we mustn’t give him anything, or take anything from him either. Any steps we might take only have the effect of delaying even more the time when he will love us again. Because he always comes back to us. We just have to hold still and wait, and then everything takes care of itself. There’s nothing else we can do anyway.”

Irmgard Keun reproduces that naïve childish voice perfectly – through Kully’s all seeing eye we see the world as it is for both adult and child. The fragility of this family’s position was one lived by hundreds, perhaps thousands of others at this time. The storms were already brewing across Europe – and reading this novel so many decades later we know what is to come – something Keun couldn’t have known in 1938. We can’t help but wonder, after we finish this novel, what happened to this family and this child of all nations – as the world tip-toed closer to war.