The Girl at the Orga Privat

The Girl at the What?

I should begin by explaining that Orga Privat was a brand of typewriter which was manufactured (originally by Bing Co. in Nuremberg) between 1923 and 1950. Although I remember seeing one among the equipment of a provincial archive in Mecklenburg in about 1990, I presume that by now the Orga Privat survives only in museums.¹ A twenty-first-century successor to Bing Co., BING Power Systems LLC, makes components for motor vehicles.

Rudolf Braune’s The Girl at the Orga Privat (Das Mädchen an der Orga Privat, 1930), was probably the first novel in German to include a brand-name product in the title. The only other such novel of which I am aware is Walter Kempowski’s Tadellöser & Wolff (1971), which alludes to the Loeser & Wolff tobacco company; Florian Illies’s bestselling Generation Golf (2000), which refers to the Volkswagen Golf, is a memoir rather than a novel.

Rudolf Braune

Born in Dresden on 16 February 1907, Braune was a young revolutionary in a hurry. After leaving school to begin an apprenticeship in the book trade, in 1923 he joined a theatrical troupe called ‘The Proletarian Audience’, which chose Ernst Toller’s Transfiguration (1919) for its debut performance and concluded that performance with the actors urging the theatregoers to join them in singing ‘The Internationale’. In 1925 Braune cofounded a magazine for young people called MOB, claiming in the introduction to the first issue that the editors were opposed to ‘the fat bourgeois’ and that they counted Lenin, Georg Büchner, Paul Klee, Otto Dix and Charlie Chaplin among their idols. The magazine published articles with titles such as ‘Christ on the Cross Is a Petit-Bourgeois Concept’ and ‘Notes of a Factory Worker’ as well as a translation of a letter from Lenin to Maxim Gorky. MOB was suppressed after five issues, following intervention by the police, and by the authorities in the schools at which the magazine was partly aimed.

Braune visited the Soviet Union in mid-1925 and moved from Dresden to Düsseldorf about a year later. There he became a member of the Communist Party of Germany and began working for a Party newspaper called Freedom. He had a particular interest in the cinema, producing more than two hundred film reviews for Freedom over about three years, but he also wrote fiction, publishing his first novel as a serial in Freedom in June and July 1928. This was The Battle on the Kille, the ‘Kille’ being a stretch of high ground between Essen and Hagen. The Girl at the Orga Privat was the first novel by Braune to appear in book form. He did not live to see the publication of his next novel, Young People in the City, at the end of 1932, as he had drowned while swimming in the Rhine near Düsseldorf on 12 June that year. He was twenty-five years old.

Braune’s premature death, and the fact that his communist beliefs led the Nazis to suppress his works, at least partly explain the lack of personal and literary documents providing information about his life and his career as an author. For example, very few letters written by or to Braune are known to be extant, and no drafts, manuscripts, proofs or other versions of his journalistic or literary publications appear to have survived. Between 1949 and 1990, the memory of Braune’s works was kept alive largely in the German Democratic Republic, with reissues of his three novels, radio and television versions of The Girl at the Orga Privat, and television and film versions of Young People in the City. However, The Girl at the Orga Privat has been reissued three times in the twenty-first century, most recently by the Jaron Press in Berlin in 2022.

The secondary literature about the novel is rather limited. The scholarly reception of Braune’s work began in the German Democratic Republic, but mostly offered formulaic assessments along the lines of Friedrich Albrecht’s characterization of Braune in 1975 as one of ‘those young authors of bourgeois origin who, during the Weimar period, formed the new generation of the proletarian-revolutionary literary movement’.² As far as I am aware, the first substantial scholarly interpretations of The Girl at the Orga Privat to appear outside the GDR were those by Christa Jordan and Renny Harrigan in 1988;³ these remain the most detailed and useful commentaries on the novel, and I will refer to them in my own analysis below. The only book about Braune, published by Martin Hollender in 2004,⁴ is very informative about the author’s life and bibliography, but does not discuss his fiction in any depth.