Ferdinand, The Man with the Kind Heart
A Novel
The last novel from the acclaimed author of The Artificial Silk Girl, this 1950 classic paints a delightfully shrewd portrait of postwar German society.
Upon his release from a prisoner-of-war camp, Ferdinand Timpe returns somewhat uneasily to civilian life in Cologne. Having survived against the odds, he is now faced with a very different sort of dilemma: How to get rid of his fiancée? Although he certainly doesn’t love the mild-mannered Luise, Ferdinand is too considerate to break off the engagement himself, so he sets about finding her a suitable replacement husband—no easy task given Luise’s high standards and those of her father, formerly a proud middle-ranking Nazi official.
Featuring a lively cast of characters—from Ferdinand’s unscrupulous landlady with…
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December 8, 2020Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin in 1905. She published her first novel, Gilgi, One of Us, in 1931. Her second novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an instant bestseller in 1932, but was then blacklisted by the Nazis. Eventually sentenced to death, she fled the country and staged her own suicide before sneaking back into Germany, where she lived undercover for the duration of the war. She later resumed writing under the name of Charlotte Tralow, enjoying only modest success until her early works were rediscovered and reissued in the late 1970s. She died in Cologne in 1982.
Ferdinand, The Man with the Kind Heart
Irmgard Keun