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'The Effingers', so you know what Berlin was like before and after the Nazis

2022-08-05T10:27:26.165Z


The Jewish writer Gabriele Tergit shows in her magnum opus a way of life in Berlin that was irretrievably lost in 1935


After the Nuremberg racial laws, posters like this one in Schwedt proliferated throughout Germany with the slogan: "Jews are not welcome in this place." Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)

What a monumental novel: how much narrative energy! How much mastery of the cast of characters!

and how much capacity for living creation!

All this masterfully sustained throughout almost a thousand pages.

The Effingers

is one of the great family sagas of 20th-century German literature, comparable only in terms of literary achievement and historical scope to

The Buddenbrooks

.

But while the novel that earned Thomas Mann the Nobel Prize portrays

fin de siècle

German society in the provinces,

The Effingers

is closer to us, since it is set mainly in the first half of the 20th century, and in the capital of Germany. .

Few books better illustrate the evolution of Berlin in the decades of its greatest splendor as a center of cultural sophistication and technological-economic thrust than this exciting chronicle of the period.

But, contrary to Mann's stately parsimony, Gabriele Tergit endows him with the freshness and grace —also sober clairvoyance— that already characterized his international success

Käsebier conquers Berlin

(Lower case).

With commendable lightness, like brief snapshots, focused with dryness and precision, key moments of politics are assembled, scenes in the living room and on the street with letters between relatives.

However, if we wanted to stretch the comparison with

The Buddenbrooks a little further,

Tergit's novel has an added value: it describes the time that leads to the great cataclysm from the perspective of a Jewish family, or, rather, of two Jewish families.

On the one hand, that of the demure watchmaker Mathias Effinger and his children, who go to seek their fortune in Berlin and London in the years of great industrial expansion;

and on the other hand, that of the worldly banker Oppner, who in the Berlin of Kaiser Wilhelm I becomes part of high society.

Two opposite worlds shake hands: that of the modest and pious village artisans, and that of the splendid and refined Berliners of the upper bourgeoisie, through the two protagonists of the novel, Mathias's sons, Karl and Paul, who marry Oppner's daughters.

The economic expansion of Bismarck's Germany is reflected in the social and economic rise of the first generation;

in the problems that arise in the second generation, the author plastically translates the decadence and social upheavals caused by the First World War into the family environment.

Significantly, there it is the women of the two families—previously relegated to the home—who come out on top.

The feminist journalist Marianne and her cousin, the theater actress Lotte, emancipate themselves from her environment and find recognition and an independent life (without male support).

In these two characters, Gabriele Tergit (pseudonym of Elise Hirschmann) has poured much of her own biography, as in general in the novel, which is based on the history of her ancestors.

Only that the author reduces to a minimum her experiences with the persecution of the Nazis who already in March 1933 assaulted her Berlin apartment.

The iron-reinforced door withstood the attack.

Barely a few brushstrokes Tergit dedicates in the novel to the atrocities that followed Hitler's seizure of power.

Very brief scenes, where for example he describes what Bertha, the sixty-year-old daughter of old Mathias, sees in the once idyllic village of Swabia during the Night of Broken Glass: “Bertha made her way through knee-deep rubble, torn fabrics , smashed and smashed objects.

She had to lift her skirts to get through the place.

She then saw a well-dressed gentleman with a gray goatee.

He was alone in the middle of a room, pulled out a knife and yelled: 'I will not let that Jewish bird live!'

She was a woman.

It was not easy to find a place in the literary world.

Then her name was blacklisted and her book was burned.

Gabriele Tergit, the celebrated author of

Käsebier,

is today, like so many Jewish writers of her generation - Nelly Sachs, Anna Seghers or Mascha Kaléko - little short of forgotten.

It is difficult to understand why it is not part of the canon of German literature.

Probably because she was a woman, and for a court reporter—and Ph.D.—it wasn't easy to find a place in a male literary scene.

And when she got it, her career was cut short by the Nazis, her first book burned, her name blacklisted.

She was pushed into exile, it took her two decades to write

The Effingers, always in precariousness and with changing addresses, and when her

magnum opus

was finally published in 1951 ,

the Germans did not want to know anything about their recent past, and even less so if a Jewish emigrant told them about it.

To what extent the Jewish culture had permeated and defined this previously advanced Germany in so many aspects no one wanted to recognize anymore.

Tergit expressly did not purport to write a reckoning.

With his book, he simply wanted to show a way of life and culture that was irretrievably lost in 1935, with the Nuremberg racial laws: “What I want is for all German Jews to say: 'Yes, that's how we were, that's how we lived between 1878 and 1939 ′;

and that they put it in the hands of their children saying: 'So that you know how it went'.

Whoever reads

The Effingers

will undoubtedly better understand what that world was like and how its destruction was possible.

look for it in your bookstore

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Source: elparis

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