Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun (1938)

A young girl and her dysfunctional parents, driven out of Germany by the Nazis, are on the run through Europe.

Book Review: Child of All Nations was written after the Nazis took power, but before the war. It's a first-hand account of those years when people knew war was coming, but could do nothing to stop it. The small family makes a desperate journey, together and apart, through Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, France, and Austria (I may've missed a country in there). For various reasons, often lack of money, they're unable to put down roots anywhere. Told by preteen Kully, her innocent eyes often see more clearly than the adults around her. Cleverly and humorously narrated, Kully is both younger and older than her years. I expected the novel to be more of a diatribe against the fascist regime that banned her books and drove Irmgard Keun (1905-82) from her homeland. She's first and most interested in telling an engaging story about a pretty mother, an alcoholic father, and a child too often on her own. She succeeds. I don't usually enjoy adult books with child narrators, as when too genuinely child-like they're not all that interesting, and if too precocious they're either insufferable or more of a literary device and stand-in for the author. In Child of All Nations Keun has done a remarkable job of threading the needle: Kully is wisely naive in just the right measure: "I fail to understand why one shouldn't ask people for money if they have got some. It annoys me when people don't hand over their money when they have it and we need it. Why do they suppose we go to the trouble of asking?" In her first two books (popular novels of the "modern woman," Gilgi, One of Us (1931) and The Artificial Silk Girl (1932)) Keun unwittingly revealed the Nazis early efforts to take power. In After Midnight (1937) and this novel she deliberately gives a contemporary account of a Germany possessed by the fascists and Europe posed on the brink of war. While still telling an enjoyable story. All Keun's novels are worth reading, with another being translated to English this year. My only (small) complaint about Child of All Nations is that the ending was somewhat abrupt and not wholly satisfying. But then again, there was no proper ending for this story in 1938.  [4★]