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In 1948, the German Jewish author Gabriele Tergit travelled to Berlin. There, in ruins, was the city in which she was born and grew up, reported on, then chronicled in fiction. Tergit had been one of the shining lights of interwar Berlin’s flourishing journalistic scene; she had also married into one of the city’s most prominent Jewish families. In 1931 her debut novel announced her as a literary phenomenon.
Then the Nazis came to power. Tergit was on an enemies list. She fled, first to Czechoslovakia, then to Palestine, and finally to London, where she lived from 1938 until her death in 1982. Never again did she call Berlin home. When she visited after the war, she found no real place in the conservative postwar German literary world – and no real audience for The Effingers, her newly completed magnum opus. A version was printed in 1951, but to little acclaim; only recently has a critical rediscovery in Germany established Tergit as one of the country’s major authors. Now, thanks to an excellent translation by Sophie Duvernoy, The Effingers is appearing in English.
The novel follows four generations of the extended Effinger family, Jewish industrialists ensconced in Berlin high society, from the Bismarck-loving 1870s to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Its central figure, Paul Effinger, heads to Berlin to make his fortune in industry. Paul, an ascetic enamoured of mass production, marries into the elite Oppner-Goldschmidt family, as does his brother, Karl. The novel follows numerous members of the extended clan through what is considered a golden age for assimilated Jewish life in Berlin. The city changes profoundly in those decades: rapid population growth, technological advances, massive inequality and inconsistent bursts of progressivism. Ultimately, the interwar era’s political and economic instability brings disaster, as does surging antisemitism.
Tergit narrates all this in sober, precise, dialogue-driven scenes, building her novel from short, reporterly chapters that vary subtly in tempo while shifting between perspectives and registers. Her authorial presence comes across not in explication or reflection but rather in what she chooses to show, and when, and how. No one point of view transcends the others. Even the admirably liberal, progress-minded ideals of certain characters are undermined by jump-cuts that show how women and the poor were often excluded from such optimism.
The Effingers is a wonderfully vivid social portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin, whose party scenes are filled with meticulous descriptions of fashion, food, interior decor and gossip; but it is also an intellectual portrait, chiefly because its characters all think and read and argue. Tergit uses the multigenerational novel form less to explore family dynamics and more to trace shifts between consecutive epochs that feel – as her characters keep saying – like the dawning of a new age. Protestant morality, industrial utopianism, liberal cosmopolitanism, various versions of Judaism, women’s liberation, nationalism, socialism: all of these inhabit the text, often in surprising combinations.
When fascism arrives in the novel, it is sudden and disorienting, but also continuous with older tendencies and ideas. With its social breadth and historical depth, The Effingers casts nazism not as a fairytale triumph of evil over good but rather through the often incoherent mixture of desires, ideas and material conditions that motivated individuals and groups to join the fascist enterprise. Tergit prefers detail to abstraction – and details resist grand explanations.
In 1949, she wrote to a publisher that The Effingers was “not the novel of Jewish fate, but rather a Berlin novel in which very many people are Jewish”. Fundamentally, Tergit’s novel lays a claim on the city as a place for Jewish people. It rejects outright the sort of fatalism that insists on the inherent misery, even impossibility, of Jewish life in Germany. It also seems sceptical towards Zionist nationalism as a form of redemption: Uncle Waldemar gives a heartfelt speech in defence of assimilated Jewish identity against all ethnic nationalisms, accusing the nascent Zionist movement of using “every argument of this dreadful new time for its own purposes”.
Like Paul’s daughter Lotte, Tergit travelled to Palestine in 1933. There she found herself out of step with Zionist emigrants whom she felt bore more intellectual kinship to German blood-and-soil thinkers than to families such as hers: “They saw anyone travelling to Palestine with a sorrowful heart as a traitor,” she later wrote. Tergit refuses to see the destruction of Jewish Berlin as inevitable. Her novel narrates a family’s tragedy – but she will not let that tragedy define them.
