Andrew O’Connell

Reflection Paper over “The Artificial Silk Girl” Pgs 1-82

This story is a narrative by Doris, a beautiful young lady in Germany. The year is 1931. She lives in the Rhineland with her father and mother – who are not wealthy, but she only used their house for a place to sleep – a room in the attic. Doris asks her mother why she married her father, and he mother says that she needed to belong somewhere. Doris is good at manipulating men, and throughout the story we get accounts of the men that she manipulates in someway or another: Pimple Face, Leo, Red Moon, White Onyx, the hunk, etc. Doris works for an attorney, whom she calls “Pimple Face,” he sends everyone home from work – except for Doris – and Doris uses their “relationship”/sexual harassment to blackmail him for 120 marks. She gives her mother 40. She not longer works for Pimple Face. She is pressured into

Doris then takes up acting. To gain respect, she tells the other girls that she is in a relationship with Leo Olmütz, the director. She finally gets a line in one of the plays by taking the place of another girl, Mila von Trapper, whom Doris had locked in a bathroom. Despite having only one line in the play, Doris receives the most flowers of any actress – she had spread the word to all of the men she had dated.

Therese is Doris’s best friend. On a night of one of the productions, she tells Doris that Hubert had called and that she had a date with him that very night. Hubert is a man that Doris dated, and still loves. He is older, and had left her to go marry a prominent figure’s daughter (so: he went to marry into money). She decides to meet him, but she doesn’t like her rain coat that she is wearing, so she steals a fur coat from a sleeping woman.

Doris flees her home because she is wanted by the law. Therese gives Doris her life’s savings, and Doris goes to Berlin. She changes her name. She goes to stay with Tilli Sherer. She has only one dress, that she washes every morning, and her one – stolen – fur coat, and she wears both everyday. She goes out with men, looking to establish contacts in different circles. She writes her mother, telling her that she misses her and Therese, and that Berlin is not as familiar as home. She meets a man we know as “Red Moon.” He favors a return to the regime of the Kaiser – from before World War I. He is old and married. She goes with Red Moon to his place, and hides (&steals) his wife’s 5, Bemberg, silk undershirts in her clothing while he is talking to her. Tilli arranges for her to take care of the children of a wealthy couple. We know the man as “White Onyx.” He offers her an apartment and money, and they start a relationship, despite his wife and family. She “cheats” on him with a “the hunk,” and he kicks her out and calls her a whore. She moves back in with Tilli, knowing she will have to leave when her husband returns. The man living upstairs is a pimp with 4 girls that work for him, but he beats them. He grabs Doris in the stairwell and she chastises him for beating those girls. He spits on her suede shoes, and “says he finds women disgusting.”

Doris & Tilli have no money. Doris can’t find work because she has no papers, but she can’t register with the police to get papers because she is still wanted by the police. But she likes Berlin – “Berlin is like Easter and Christmas combined” - although she doesn’t know what she is going to eat the next day.

The most distinct feature of Irmgard Keun’s style is her use of the hyphen. This causes the story to jump from one thought to another very quickly and abruptly. It can offer more information to a scene, but I found that I would be reading a sentence and it would change entirely to a different topic. It jumps between the story our narrator is telling, and her thoughts. (i.e. pg 10: “And he has been gone for an entire year – God, I’m so tired now.)

Similar to the summary I’ve just written, this story is very fragmented because we are getting entries from Doris’s journal. She is our narrator, and we get her perspective on everything. She seems to mean well in all her actions, but whenever she does something that is suppose to turn out well for herself, it turns out badly. And all we see is her opinion of everything, which has us saying: “oh, that is so unfair.”

Through this recounting of all this experiences that Doris has, I do think we see a unique perspective of Germany in 1931. The role of the family seems to not mean much to Doris. She loves her mother, but has no feeling towards her father – the traditional head of a German household. And her mother tells her that she married her father so that she could belong somewhere – just to have a man. Doris rejects this notion of needing a man as a place to belong. She has dated innumerable men, and doesn’t look like she is going to slow down, but perhaps she will…

There are important political and social questions addressed in the story as well. I have already mentioned “Red Moon,” who is an ultra-conservative writer who does not like the current democracy and is in favor of a return to a more centralized government like the one during the 2^nd Reich with Kaiser Wilhelm II. Racist comments are made against Frenchmen and Jews, and Doris doesn’t know why. She says she is Jewish because a man asks her if she is and she thinks he is interested in her only if she IS Jewish. He then gives her a tongue-lashing for being Jewish. She asks the navy-blue married man about Frenchmen and Jews and what it is about them, and he ignores her question and starts talking about Christmas presents. I think this shows that people in Germany at this time either foster direct racism or choose to ignore it altogether.

Questions:

· What do COMMAS mean to Doris?

· Is Doris trying to make everyone happy? If yes, why?

· What is the meaning of all of the relationships in her life?

· Does she have any chance of making her life better? How can she do that in the world in which she lives?

· It seems like Doris gets whatever she wants or could convince someone to help her or give her anything that she wants, so why is she in such a poor situation?

· What does this story say about Germany’s status in 1931, politically, socially, economically? What does Doris think about this? What does Keun think about this?