Gilgi (25 page)

Despite Gilgi’s comment here, “great drama” is a constant and significant element in her own story. Gilgi’s initial self-concept is founded on a fierce commitment to material and emotional self-sufficiency. Her meditations during the first scene in her attic room are about professional success through her own efforts, whether through her skills in office work, foreign languages, or dress design. She is equally self-contained when she decides that the departure of Olga’s brother after their brief romantic interlude is “as it should be” (
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), and that spending time as a family with Herr and Frau Kron “is always a pointless waste of time” (
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). But simultaneously as the narrative communicates all this, it also suggests that Gilgi’s autonomous persona is somewhat self-conscious and exaggerated, as when she “assumes her best woman-of-the-world expression” (
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) while discussing with Olga how to divert her boss Herr Reuter’s sexual advances without endangering her job. Moreover, the narrative notes how Gilgi avoids showing her admiration for Olga by criticizing the “dirty marks” (
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) on her blouse instead, and how “if she didn’t have such a distaste for the word ‘romance,’ you could say: for Gilgi, Olga represents romance” (
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), as though Gilgi’s studied self-sufficiency will eventually face challenges from circumstances and emotions which she cannot disregard forever.

When these challenges duly emerge, they do so in a
greatly dramatic manner. Firstly, the Krons reveal that Gilgi is adopted, and when she seeks out the woman whom the Krons believe to be her birth mother, Fräulein Täschler, the plot thickens still further: the impoverished Fräulein Täschler explains that she passed Gilgi off as her own child because she was paid by a well-to-do family who concealed their unmarried daughter’s pregnancy to preserve their reputation in society. These revelations encourage Gilgi to reflect on how much her career success so far owes to her middle-class upbringing with the Krons as well as to her own efforts (“Just don’t stick your nose so high in the air, just don’t always think it’s so completely your own doing,”
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), and to sympathize with those who are less successful than she is, such as the unemployed “pale woman” who also applied for the casual typing job which Gilgi secures with Herr Mahrenholz (
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–
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). Secondly, Gilgi falls suddenly and tumultuously in love with Martin, with the narrative characterizing her attraction to his bohemian, exuberant personality as the more or less inevitable reflex of her rationality and self-containment:

Gilgi’s imagination was always a well-behaved child: it was allowed to play in the street, but not to go beyond the corner. Now the well-behaved child is venturing a little further for once. Martin talks, and Gilgi sees: oceans, deserts, countries—but that’s not the essence of what she’s seeing, she’d like to make an accounting to herself—as she always does—to record her feelings in her own words. Oh, my little, gray words! That someone can speak so colorfully! She’s sitting on a sphere that’s damp with
rain—there’s a sun far, far away in the sky—with each hand you grab a sunbeam, […] you’re getting closer and closer to the sun’s hot orange-red ball. (
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)

As her emotional dependence on Martin increases, Gilgi abandons her material and professional ambitions almost entirely, for example by doing “something […] disorienting and momentous” (
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) in absenting herself from work on a false plea of illness, and later by actively welcoming the loss of her job when the hard-pressed Herr Reuter reduces his staff: “Thank God, thank God—now it’s not my fault, I can’t be blamed” (
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).

Gilgi’s story reaches its peak of drama after she encounters her former friend Hans, and undertakes to save him from jail by repaying the twelve hundred marks he has embezzled to feed his destitute family. This leads her to contact her affluent birth mother Frau Greif for the first time (“I want you to give me five hundred marks, and I want to tell you that you’re my mother,”
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), Frau Greif hands over several rings which were gifts from her husband (“every time he cheats on me he gives me a piece of jewelry,”
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), Gilgi is then diverted from delivering her own money and the rings by Martin’s jealous demands on her (“I want you to stay here, Gilgi—do you hear me, I want you to,”
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), and the next morning she discovers that Hans, his wife Hertha and their two children have committed suicide. Gilgi reacts to this dénouement by resolving to seek work in Berlin (where she intends to bear her child and raise it by herself), leaving Martin immediately. For Gilgi has decided that her love for Martin is destroying her autonomy completely, but that she should
not expect him to adapt his life to hers in any way, as she explains to her friend Pit:

Even if I weren’t having the child—I’d have to leave him—for my sake and for his sake. I can’t work, Pit—if I’m with him. I’ve already tried, and I’ve seen and lived what happens then. I just love him too much—and in every way, and I only have to look at him for everything else to become meaningless to me, utterly, utterly meaningless. […] And you see, Pit, I have to work and keep my life in order … he doesn’t have enough money to support me—and anyway I wouldn’t want him to, if he did have enough. […] And he’s not at all used to working for money. He doesn’t understand it. And you know, someone can probably change of their own accord—but wanting to change someone else just means making life difficult for yourself and for them. (
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–
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)

Thus at the end of the novel Gilgi reverts to and intensifies one of the attitudes which she demonstrated at the beginning. She does not simply reiterate that professional success is purely a matter of individual effort (“I’ve seen so many people who looked for work and didn’t find it—but most of them only half-wanted it, they’d already given up on everything. […] My will is stronger and more durable,”
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), but she expects to succeed notwithstanding that she is now unemployed, without any support from the Krons, and intending to assume sole care of a baby. Gilgi also reverts in a significant sense to her emotional self-sufficiency, regarding her baby as a kind of insurance
against further romantic entanglements (“without the child, without such a stark necessity it would’ve been harder. I would’ve had no armor—and so alone—maybe some man or other—,”
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), though presumably she feels a connection to the baby, and through it to Martin, and she has a confused hope that she will be reunited with Martin eventually: “And then if I’m making a living later—a good, secure living—and the child—Pit, don’t you think too that then he’d come to me and be proud and happy, and everything would turn out right?” (
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).

In characterizing Gilgi’s initial self-concept as somewhat overwrought, and then showing how it fluctuates through dramas of abandonment, passion, jealousy, suicide, and “flight” (
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), the narrative maintains a measure of detachment from her, and it extends this detachment by signaling doubts about Gilgi’s ultimate plans, particularly in the final scene when she boards the train to Berlin. The most obvious signal is when Gilgi tries to smile, to convince Pit that she is confident about the future, but only “half-succeed[s]” (
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). The repeated image of the orange lying in front of the locomotive (which clearly invokes Gilgi’s love for Martin; see
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) is similarly ambiguous, as it is uncertain whether the orange is crushed by the departing train or lies far enough below the machinery to survive unscathed. And there is a more subtle double-edged allusion in the description of how Gilgi “gives Pit her hand once more” (
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) from the train, as this recalls the song—known in German as “Reich mir zum Abschied noch einmal die Hände” and in English as “Good Night”—which is in Gilgi’s thoughts earlier in the novel (see
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), and which is sung by the lovers Victoria and Stephan in the operetta and film
Victoria and Her Hussar
(1930 and 1931) immediately before they are separated. This reference could ridicule Gilgi’s decision to renounce Martin in the hope of an eventual reunion by linking it with a kitschy popular drama, but that reunion could also be foreshadowed by the fact that Victoria and Stephan are married at the end of their story.

There are also some short passages earlier in the novel which have implications for Gilgi’s plans after she leaves Cologne. The first is when Herr Kron reads out a newspaper report about a woman who killed her child by jumping with it from “the Treptow Bridge” (
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), which is in Berlin. The second is when Fräulein Täschler recalls that many of her customers “didn’ want anythin’ to do with me anymore” (
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) when she was passing herself off as Gilgi’s unmarried mother. The third is when Gilgi reads a letter from the “little Dutch girl” who is “still in love with Martin” (
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), and who still writes to him. All three passages are bad omens for Gilgi’s ideas about supporting herself as a single mother in Berlin, and perhaps one day returning to Martin, though of course these omens are of no account if Gilgi really is as exceptionally competent as she believes, and it is possible that she would encounter less prejudice than Fräulein Täschler suffered twenty years previously.

The narrative’s slightly detached presentation of Gilgi’s frenetic present and her ambiguous future is complemented by its account of her difficulties in expressing herself verbally. Although there was some justification for the dismissive remark of Keun’s great contemporary Kurt Tucholsky that the characters in
Gilgi, One of Us
too often speak “as though they’d just been eating Freud for breakfast,” later commentators such as Ritta Jo Horsley
have shown that the issue is more complex than that. For the novel emphasizes what Horsley has termed “Gilgi’s crisis of language” repeatedly, most often by describing her relationship to “words” (“Worte” in the German text). For example, the difference between Gilgi’s psychology and Martin’s which is apparent at their first meeting is encapsulated in her sense (in the passage quoted above) that she has only “little, gray words,” and her wonder that Martin “can speak so colorfully.” When Gilgi tries shortly afterwards to clarify her feelings for Martin, she thinks that she “should probably talk to someone, but there wouldn’t actually be any point. Because she doesn’t have any words, to make herself understood” (
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). She does talk to Olga later, but only to reiterate her linguistic deficiencies:

And you’re together at night and walk beside each other during the day, without a single word that binds you—you only catch words which are soap-bubbles. […] And you’re all ripped up, and have typewriter words and clockwork words and everyday words and don’t want to think about yourself and should think about yourself. (
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)

And nothing changes in the remainder of the narrative. When Gilgi is preoccupied after visiting Hertha, and Martin worries that she no longer loves him, she asks herself: “Why don’t I have any words—for Martin—or for myself, either?” (
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); and when Martin’s possessiveness flares again as she explains why she is giving Frau Greif’s rings to Hans and Hertha, Gilgi feels “more and more of her words […] sliding back inside her” (
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–
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).

However, there are few indications that, if Gilgi were
ever to articulate her thoughts and feelings more clearly, Martin would listen to her. When Gilgi leaves the Krons and goes to Martin’s apartment, she is still debating aloud whether to live there or in her attic room when he—“ignoring these words completely” (
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)—starts unpacking her suitcase. On a subsequent occasion when Gilgi talks to Martin in bed, it turns out that “he’s asleep” (
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). And in the conversation about Frau Greif’s rings mentioned above, Martin’s interpretation of Gilgi’s sympathy for Hans is shaped by jealousy: “So this is what I understand now—an old boyfriend of yours was here, and you concealed that from me” (
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). Martin’s failures to listen to Gilgi are paralleled for most of the narrative by Pit: for instance when she seeks him out after her first encounter with Fräulein Täschler, but he delivers a political monologue while she waits in vain “for a moment when she can interrupt him and tell him about the things which are more important to her, and have more to do with her, just now” (
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), or when he refuses to discuss her relationship with Martin because he is attracted to her himself: “Why are you telling me this—you! That’s why you came to me—that’s why … just to tell me …” (
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). It is also worth noting that Gilgi’s relationship with Martin meets with blank incomprehension and uncompromising rejection from the Krons: Frau Kron can only account for it by wailing that “some man has hypnotized you” (
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), and Herr Kron can only deal with it by “laying down the law” (
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) and forbidding Gilgi the house, leaving her to conclude that “there just isn’t any common ground” (
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) between her and her adoptive parents. But those in the older generation who claim to empathize with Gilgi and her peers leave her unmoved, as she complains to Martin
about “those old people who have thrown themselves into the new era. The ones who write about sport-oriented modern youth, driving cars, short skirts, short hair, and jazz, and have an amazing ability to hit the nail right next to the head” (
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).

Gilgi’s recurring struggle to express herself adequately, Martin’s and Pit’s repeated failure to listen properly, the Krons’ complete inability to understand her unconventional morality, and other older people’s misguided belief that they do understand “the new era” indicate one important reason for the great drama of Gilgi’s life in Cologne and the obvious uncertainty of her prospects in Berlin. Gilgi’s identity as a New Woman seems highly colored and somewhat unrealistic because neither she nor the society around her has yet fully assimilated that identity intellectually, has yet fully described it verbally, or has yet reached the point where the language required to discuss it has become “everyday words.” The melodramatic element in
Gilgi, One of Us
reflects and underlines how significant personal challenges and vigorous social controversies are associated with Gilgi’s claim to emancipated femininity, rather than (as Tucholsky suggested) unwittingly betraying Keun’s inexperience as an author. After all, Keun asserts the legitimacy of popular artistic styles when Gilgi, bored while attending a classical concert with Martin, muses that: “Literature, music, painting—it’s a funny thing, art. One person’s Rubinstein—is another’s dance-band leader, one person’s Rembrandt—is another’s commercial artist. What can you do?” (
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). And for evidence that Gilgi was a highly unsettling character for the society in which she lived, we need look no further than how the film version of her story changed the ending
to foreclose her vision of a consciously chosen and self-supporting unmarried motherhood.