The narrator of Irmgard Keun’s 1938 novella is Kully, a 9-year-old German girl who is forced to travel across Europe with her parents after they become literary-political exiles from the Nazi regime. Kully is wise beyond her years, but it is a wisdom expressed with clear-sighted innocence. Her child’s-eye view of her parents’ financial and personal problems illuminates the plight of Hitler’s exiles in a new and poignant light. Keun was Joseph Roth’s companion during his last years, and, despite her own protestations to the contrary, it is hard not to see Kully’s father, a charming heavy-drinker, ludicrously generous to strangers but often strangely neglectful of those closest to him, as a veiled portrait of Roth. In his afterword, translator Michael Hofmann writes: ‘Keun has few rivals . . . as a chronicler of the ambience or the consequences of the rise of Nazism. Her canny choice of “small” central figures . . . allows her to refract and comment on huge themes without using big words; it provides an ideal entry, a shrewd lever.’

The infantile author enchants adults, who feel free to patronise the innocence of children, and safe in the harmlessness of the child’s quaint vision of the world. The Kully of Keun’s imagination is rather different. Her world is horrific, and quaint becomes eerie. When she and her father sail to America to try his luck, it turns out, after they’re at sea, that her mother has missed the boat:

I did once go sailing in Denmark, and that’s why I was hardly afraid at all now. In fact, I wasn’t ever really afraid; just on the third day I badly wanted to get off. I had to keep thinking of my mother, who was never alone in her life, only sometimes without my father. But now she didn’t even have me to protect her. I could picture her crying, and doing unbalanced things.

(LRB 10 April 2008)

Penguin | hardback 195 pp. |ISBN: 9780713999075