Author(s): Irmgard Keun

Novel | Translated fiction | Germany | Historical

Nineteen-year-old Sanna just wants to drink her beer in peace, but that's difficult when Hitler has come to town and his motorcade is blocking the streets of Frankfurt. And now life seems more complicated every day. Her best friend Gerti is in love with a Jewish boy, her brother writes books that have been put on a black list and her own aunt may denounce her to the authorities at any moment...

Keun's masterpiece, written after she had fled Nazi Germany, captures the hysteria and horror of the era with devastating vividness and redemptive humour.

Review: I cannot think of anything else that conjures up so powerfully the atmosphere of a nation turned insane * Sunday Telegraph *
Acerbically observed by this youthful, clever, undeceived eye....Crystalline yet acid * Jewish Chronicle *
Explosive ... Reading After Midnight today [still] feels dangerous. I kept turning to the copyright page, unable to believe that such a sexually and politically frank book could have been published in 1937 Germany ... After Midnight haunts far beyond its final page * NPR *
Brief, important and haunting -- Penelope Lively

Author Biography: Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905 and found instant success with her novels Gilgi (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (1932). Everything changed in 1933 when the Nazis blacklisted her and destroyed her books; in response, she attempted to sue the Gestapo for loss of earnings. She left Germany (and her husband) in 1936 and lived in exile in Europe, where she wrote Child of All Nations (1936) and After Midnight (1937). She sneaked back into Germany in 1940 under a false name and spent the rest of the war in Cologne. In later years, she wrote for magazines and radio and raised a daughter alone. She died in 1982.