Irmgard Keun was an acclaimed and popular novelist in Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), whose works reached an international audience in the 1930s and 1940s. Known for their irreverent humour and their naïve yet canny female narrators, Keun’s novels captured the precariousness of life in late Weimar Germany. Blacklisted by the National Socialists (commonly known as the Nazis) in 1933, she went into exile in 1936 and continued to write novels that cast a critical eye on the petit-bourgeois milieu and its submission to fascist barbarism. Keun returned to Germany in 1940, but her post-war life was marked by financial hardship, alcohol abuse, and mental and physical breakdowns.

Irmgard Keun was an acclaimed and popular novelist in Germany during the final years of the Weimar Republic (1918–33), whose works reached an international audience in the 1930s and 1940s. Known for their irreverent humour and their naïve yet canny female narrators, Keun’s novels captured the precariousness of life in late Weimar Germany. Blacklisted by the National Socialists (commonly known as the Nazis) in 1933, she went into exile in 1936 and continued to write novels that cast a critical eye on the petit-bourgeois milieu and its submission to fascist barbarism. Keun returned to Germany in 1940, but her post-war life was marked by financial hardship, alcohol abuse, and mental and physical breakdowns.