After Midnight by Irmgard Keun [U.S. FIRST EDITION] 1938 • Alfred A. Knopf

After Midnight by Irmgard Keun [translated from the German Nach Mitternacht by James Cleugh]

U.S. FIRST EDITION [1938] ALFRED A. KNOPF

Rare 1935 1st edition of this classic novel of coming-of-age in nazi germany. 

Cloth bound antique hardcover sans dust jacket in very good condition. 

Very attractive decorative cloth boards with some visible shelf and rub wear, mostly to rear cloth. 

Binding is tight with some bumping to top of spine.

Pages look and read beautifully with some inevitable tanning.   Gorgeous!

Sanna and her ravishing friend Gerti would rather speak of love than politics, but in 1930s Frankfurt, politics cannot be escaped -- even in the lady's bathroom. Crossing town one evening to meet up with Gerti's Jewish lover, a blockade cuts off the girls' path -- it is the Fürher in a motorcade procession, and the crowd goes mad striving to catch a glimpse of Hitler's raised "empty hand." Then the parade is over, and in the long hours after midnight Sanna and Gerti will face betrayal, death, and the heartbreaking reality of being young in an era devoid of innocence or romance.

In 1937, German author Irmgard Keun had only recently fled Nazi Germany with her lover Joseph Roth when she wrote this slim, exquisite, and devastating book. It captures the unbearable tension, contradictions, and hysteria of pre-war Germany like no other novel. Yet, even as it exposes human folly, the book exudes a hopeful humanism. It is full of humor and light, even as it describes the first moments of a nightmare. After Midnight is a masterpiece that deserves to be read and remembered.