This was the manuscript that Keun took with her in her suitcase when she went into exile, and it's the first of her books to have been published in Amsterdam. Contrary to what you might expect in the circumstances and with that title (literally: The girl the children weren't allowed to associate with) it's not a critique of the current political situation in Germany, but a comic children's book, whose only explicit political content harks back to before 1918.

The (never-named) narrator of the stories is that archetype of children's fiction, the child who does everything for the best possible reasons but somehow always ends up causing unintended and very comical mayhem and getting herself into trouble. The book is set in a middle-class suburb of Köln in the years around the end of the Great War, and the narrator is about nine or ten in the first story, thirteen in the last, so roughly the same age as the author. Keun is - of course - a specialist in comic first-person narrators. The little girl's voice is entirely convincing, and she very effectively draws us into her frustration with the condition of childhood and the grown-ups' failure to appreciate her real good qualities. The inevitable escalation of the minor bits of mischief into major disasters is handled very cleverly as well. I suspect that a child reading along with an adult would be a little bit annoyed to find how many surreptitious grown-up jokes the author has buried in the text, but conversely the adult reader would be horrified at the dangerous and anti-social ideas a child might get from the book, so the two things probably cancel each other out. Anyway, I don't think a modern child would be able to track down a source of laundry blue, so we're probably safe!

I wondered at first whether Keun had set out to write a children's book in the hope of circumventing the Nazi ban on her work, but with a general theme that definitely doesn't reflect the Nazi ideal of womanhood and two explicitly anti-war chapters (in one the narrator writes a letter to the Kaiser urging him to abdicate and end the war, in the other she tries to help soldiers on leave to infect themselves with her little brother's scarlet fever germs so they won't have to return to the trenches), this obviously isn't a book that could have been published in Germany at the time. However, unlike her novels for adults, it was re-published in Germany shortly after the war, and there was even an English translation as early as 1955. ( )