1937, Irmgard Keun published a short novel, After Midnight , which tells the story of two young women in 1930s Frankfurt who find themselves caught up in a parade and rally starring Adolf Hitler. The rally touches off a series of events in which the characters struggle to make sense of their lives, beliefs, and experiences in the darkening shadow of the Nazis’ cultural juggernaut. Keun, an avowed anti-Nazi whose books were burned and banned in the Reich, is fascinating in her own right, but so is the picture she paints in After Midnight of characters who are committed Nazis...