The girl with whom the children were not allowed
The girl with whom the children were not allowed to socialize is a youth novel by Irmgard Keun , which was published in 1936 by Allert de Lange in Amsterdam. Keun fled to Ostend in 1936 to avoid persecution by the National Socialists .
content
A schoolgirl, born around 1908, talks about incidents in her hometown of Cologne in the second half of 1918. The first-person narrator , who does not reveal her name, does not even know why she receives one reprimand after the other at school . The child also causes a lot of noise at home. Because of the girl's pranks, many children are not allowed to socialize with him at the scene of the action, a suburb of Cologne .
The narrator is in third grade and has enemies among the adults. One such enemy is Mrs. Meiser, who is responsible for the ban on contact. But the injured party does not accept it, but even uses her father Victor, a less than successful businessman, in the fight against Ms. Meiser. Victor is encouraged to construct depth charges and drop them on the sidewalk from a great height. One of the bulging paper bags promptly bursts on Frau Meiser's head. At times the narrator is in opposition to the mother, but basically they both love each other. The mother shows great understanding for the daughter's stupid things.
There is no longer a copper pot in the parents' household, as the material was used for cannons due to the war. The narrator wrote to the Kaiser in the summer of 1918 . The war had been going on for far too long, and instead of sugar there was only saccharine to buy; in addition, all maternal uncles had died. Peace is preferable to war.
On a hamster tour, the family is treated roughly by a farmer. On the way back, the narrator runs into workers from ammunition factories: faces and hair look green and yellow. The neighbor, Mr. Kleinerz, has a "shot arm". The father is in trouble with the letter to the Kaiser. Somebody intercepted the unstamped envelope with the critical document in it in the mail. Every day the father has to put up with insistent questions at police headquarters. The narrator steals turnips from the wagon during the famine at the Cologne freight yard . The train leaves with the narrator during the theft and only stops again in Frechen . The little turnip thief jumps off and arrives safely at her mother's place with a full mousepad. The daughter can lie to her about the origin of the much sought-after yellowish-reddish folk food.
After November 1918 , peace was in sight and Cologne was under British occupation. " Depression - that's sadness," the reader is taught at the end of the novel.
At the end the narrator makes a leap in time. The war is over two years. Every now and then, when the occasion arises, the girl protests that she no longer wants to live. But these are all idioms. In reality, the now 13-year-old never lets herself get down. Where do the kids come from The curious one cannot or would not answer this question. But the precocious child is already thinking in the right direction. It gives serious thought to love because it is like walking "hand in hand to the sun" .
reception
The novel was written by the professional writer before her exile - simply to earn a living. The happily written book invites you to reflect again and again. The numerous chapters have a deep sense of humor and deal with the pranks and adventures of this ten-year-old girl who is not ready to simply accept the world as it is supposed to be. She does not want to adhere to all the rules established by adults because she does not find them meaningful, and she tries to change the world for the better with her mostly good-natured pranks . Some reviewers suggest that the novel has autobiographical traits. The attempts to infect three soldiers with scarlet fever at their request in order to avoid further military service may have been invented, but the petition to the emperor is based on Keun's complaint against the government to get back the money lost due to the ban on books .
literature
- Irmgard Keun: The girl the children weren't allowed to associate with . Illustrations Paul Urban . Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1936
- The girl with whom the children were not allowed. Novel. Claassen, Düsseldorf 1980; Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 4th edition 1987. ISBN 3-404-11172-9 . dtv, Munich 1993 ISBN 3-423-11034-1 . Progress, Moscow 1982 (in German, with Russian foreword)
- Liane Schüller: Everything is a secret under the stones . Children's figures from Irmgard Keun. In: Women Writing in the Early 20th Century. Edited by G. Ackermann u. W. Delabar. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2011, pp. 311–326. ISBN 978-3-89528-857-9 .
- Gero von Wilpert : Lexicon of world literature. German Authors A - Z . Stuttgart 2004 ISBN 3-520-83704-8 p. 331
- Gesche Blume: Irmgard Keun. Writing in a game with modernity. Dissertation. Series: Works on Modern German Literature 23. Ed. Dorothee Kimmich u. a. Dresden 2005. ISBN 3-937672-38-9