The Artificial Silk Girl was a huge bestseller in Weimar Germany, until the Nazis banned it in 1933 and destroyed all existing copies.

Coming from modest circumstances with an alcoholic, absent father, she dreams of a life as a celebrity in high society.

Finally, when she is completely penniless, she meets a man Ernst, who takes her home and lets her live with him without expecting anything in return.

At the end of the novel, she is once again penniless and homeless and finally decides to move in with the peddler Karl, who lives in a gazebo.

At least in Weimar Berlin, Keun met with much literary success, as an April 1933 article in the Leipzig weekly Das Leben attested.

[3] In one monthly, Der Querschnitt, a July 1932 publisher's advertisement for the book quotes Kurt Tucholsky as saying that Keun was the first female German humorist (‘was es noch niemals gegeben hat: eine deutsche Humoristin’), whilst Hanns Martin Elster asserted that she should be read and understood everywhere 'as a woman and a human being' ("Irmgard Keun sollte nicht nur als Dichterin, sollte auch als Frau und Mensch überall gelesen, überall verstanden werden").

[4] A November 1932 review in the monthly Sherl’s Magazin describes Keun’s novel as ‘a book for the young’ ("das Buch aller jungen Menschen") and engages with the issue of modern materialism, saying ‘not everything that is gold, shines’ ("nicht alles Gold ist, was glänzt").