Irmgard Keun was born in Berlin, Germany in 1905. She had early stage aspirations, and landed several minor film roles before turning to writing. Her first novel, Gilgi, eine von uns (Gilgi, One of Us), was a runaway bestseller and made into a film the year after it was published.

Her second novel, Das kunstseidene Maedchen (The Artificial Silk Girl), was published in 1932. Like Gilgi, it chronicled the aspirations of a voiceless and downtrodden lower-class "steno-girl." It was also a huge success, and optioned by UFA as a motion picture. But when Hitler came to power the following January, this story (about an ambitious secretary-turned-thief sleeping her way through Berlin to become "a star") became a political liability.

An outspoken opponent of everything that the Nazi Party stood for, by 1934, Keun's novels had been banned, confiscated, and destroyed in Germany.

She fled to Belgium and then Holland, but after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands that country was no longer safe for her. Rumors of her suicide (perhaps started by Keun herself) allowed her to return to the Reich under an assumed name, and she remained in Germany (living in hiding from 1940-45) until her death in 1982.