I should begin by explaining that Orga Privat was a brand of typewriter which was manufactured originally by Bing Co. Although I remember seeing one among the equipment of a provincial archive in Mecklenburg in about , I presume that by now the Orga Privat survives only in museums. Born in Dresden on 16 February , Braune was a young revolutionary in a hurry. 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.
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 The Girl at the Orga Privat was the first novel by Braune to appear in book form.
He was twenty-five years old. 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. 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 The secondary literature about the novel is rather limited.
The Girl at the Orga Privat is therefore one of several novels published during the last years of the Weimar Republic dealing partly or wholly with women who worked in offices and shops. These novels and films reflected a number of significant developments in German society after the Great War.
Depictions and discussions of New Women in literature and cinema and elsewhere often paid particular attention to their sex lives and their clothes. Finally, the Weimar Republic saw the rise of Berlin — which of course had only become the national capital with the unification of Germany in — demographically, economically and culturally to the status of a European city comparable in significance to Paris and London.
