‘The Effingers: A Berlin Saga

By Gabriele Tergit (Translated by Sophie Duvernoy)

Pushkin Press. 853 pages. £20 ISBN 13:978-1-78227-951-8

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

In 1901 Thomas Mann published Buddenbrooks, a novel which told the story of a nineteenth century, north German merchant family over four generations. Fifty years later Gabriele Tergit published The Effingers, which inescapably evokes the earlier book, since it is also a literary family saga. Tergit’s novel concerns bourgeois Jewish society in Berlin. It spans the life of the new nation from unification, the year after Germany’s victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 —roughly when Mann’s novel ends —to 1939.

I should stress to begin with that, although world events are constantly threatening, this is a novel above all about a family. It is full of interesting characters whose different paths in life we follow. The Effingers has the historical understanding of Mann’s classic, but is told in a more modern, quasi-journalistic style. Newly rediscovered, it has just been translated to excellent reviews by the cultural critic Sophie Duvernoy.

Gabriele Tergit (1894-1982) was a member of the bourgeois society she depicts (‘a dyed-in-the-wool Berliner,’ in her own words). She was born Elise Hirschmann, the daughter of an industrialist from Franconia who moved to Berlin to found a cable-manufacturing company. His wife, a member of an affluent Munich family, was a committed liberal. While initially interested in social work, Tergit switched course and earned a PhD in Berlin under the controversial historian Friedrich Meinecke. She became a journalist and then staff writer for the liberal Berliner Tageblatt. Tergit satirised the newspaper world in a bestselling novel, Käsebier Takes Berlin (1931), but as a vocal anti-Nazi felt it expedient to leave Germany in 1933. She and her architect husband eventually settled in London. Tergit wrote other works but The Effingers, completed in 1948, attracted disappointingly little attention in its day. Later she dedicated her time to her role as PEN club secretary. She lived long enough to see interest in her work rekindled, firstly in Germany in the 1970s. According to Duvernoy, ‘In 1998, the city of Berlin chose to name a street leading off Potsdamer Platz in her honor: Gabriele-Tergit-Promenade.’

The Effingers, now published by Puskin Press/ NYRB, is a handsomely produced novel (which, in my opinion, lacks only a character index). It is involving and yet fast-moving, its weight lightened by Tergit’s realistic, accessible style. Chapters are very short and cut sharply between incidents and characters. Scenes are propelled by heated conversations about family matters, the state of the nation and the changing status of the Jews. Tergit has the reportorial eye for detail, particularly with dialogue, architecture, food and fashion. (There is a tendency to repeat how beautiful each of the women are and how handsome some of the men. Journalistic shorthand, or an effort to illuminate the vanity of characters and values?)

The Effinger family begin their lives in Kragsheim, in Southern Germany, a small community ‘still entrenched in the Middle Ages’ where ‘one time flowed into another’. The parents, Mathias and Minna are observant Jews, the watchmaker father particularly so. They have several children. The self-assured Willy becomes a watch salesman; his sister, Helene, opens what later grows into a department store. Benno affects an English style and prospers greatly there. The modest Paul, the central character, a man who believes ‘that prayer and work, ora et labora, were a sufficient moral foundation for life,’ travels to Berlin in the hope of becoming a manufacturer. At this time, 1878, it is a small, ugly city but by1933 its population will reach over four million. The many poor industrial workers live in crowded tenements, which breed socialism, resentment and anti-Semitism among other things.

High-society financiers, like the Oppner-Goldschmidt family into which Paul’s flamboyant brother Karl soon marries, live in splendour. The presiding generation consists of Selma Oppner (wife of Emmanuel, a hero of the 1848 revolution), Ludwig Goldschmidt, and the jurist Waldemar Goldschmidt. These are the wealthy children of a late banker whose fortunes will decline.

The Effingers in contrast prosper for a good part of the novel, their lifestyle lavish. Paul, the most ascetic of them, turns his initial ambition to manufacture screws into a successful car building business with brother Karl. In the course of the novel we meet family members who represent a comprehensive range of attitudes. Some impress us, like Waldemar or the socially committed Marianne Effinger, and some who are decadent like James (the latter two are children of Karl and his vain wife, Annette). Others lead adventurous bohemian lives —the artistic Sophie Oppner and Lotte Effinger (something of an author surrogate) for instance — or dangerous ones like Erwin Effinger and Theo Oppner.

The principal engine of the novel is the fixation —addressed recurrently —with progress and with upward social mobility (‘If you’re not moving forward you’re slipping behind’ says Karl, who believes a factory expands or closes.) The men of their generation, unlike their children, are largely ambitious, enterprising people, but not the cut-throat capitalists they are caricatured as. As one character remarks, ‘If we kept  to class expectations, we’d have to represent the interests of big business. But in our hearts we’re socialists.’

It all begins optimistically. On the surface things are calmer than the international situation suggests. The Effingers are young with the new German Empire. The Reichstag has abolished restrictions on civil and political rights, emancipating the Jews. Unfortunately, as they achieve some success, society is subject to an economic rollercoaster.

As far as they are concerned, the Effingers, the Oppners and the Goldschmidts are historically entrenched German Jews. To society at large, however, they are always firstly Jews. Early in the novel Benno offers Paul the opportunity to work in London, away from the anti-Semitism of home, ‘The merchant is considered scarcely more than a swindler, and if he is a Jew, then he is nothing but a swindler.’

With the economy frequently in jeopardy and themselves a target, the pragmatic, like Paul, focus on the tasks at hand while the high-minded, like Waldemar Goldschmidt, seek consolation in virtue: ‘ I belong to a despised race and am a second-class citizen in Germany. But I have one advantage which will reveal itself one day: Through my existence as a Jew, I am a witness to the power of the spirit and of non-violence.’ It would be beneath his self-respect and dignity to convert to Christianity for simple gain, he argues. Some young people share his view, ‘Assimilation is disgusting’, according to one character. Some yearn to leave for Palestine.

Waldemar is correct. The truth is that their much vaunted freedom to mix in German society has always been circumscribed —they cannot be reserved officers or civil servants, or even postmen, one character observes. Duvernoy reminds us in her informative ‘Afterward’, ‘By the 1910s, the Effingers and Oppners move in a self-enclosed Jewish world and, notwithstanding their wealth, have little contact with the Prussian aristocracy or the Christian middle class.’

Then the militaristic and acquisitive emperor Kaiser Wilhelm 11 drives Europe toward a war no-one is prepared for, since it is thought inconceivable: ‘“A war,” said Karl Effinger, holding a thick Cuban cigar between his fingers and leaning against the paneled wall near the table of older gentlemen, “cannot take place in Europe and will become increasingly unlikely as our industries expand… The world has taken significant strides towards unification.” He sees progress everywhere: “Why, even the maids of today could be mistaken for the well-to-do ladies of yesteryear.”’ Such is the innocence of the times. It is evident also in a phrase from Erwin’s call-up papers when the war does come: ‘You are ordered to present yourself, freshly washed, at Military District Command 1 on Monday, April 13,1915.’

The stability of the social order also dies with the generation of young men. Marianne Effinger, who works for fourteen years in the welfare ministry, reflects, ‘Things were so different before the war — you know that! The girls married between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one, and status mattered. Young men had to have made something of themselves and finished sowing their wild oats. They were usually ready by thirty. Matches were often arranged through relatives; it mostly worked.’ This disguises the heartache many of the women suffer, bound by domestic duty or male expectations. The more interesting lives are led by those like Marianne or Sophie who break the mould at some cost.

Defeat in the war leads to the left-wing November Revolution of 1918. The punitive Treaty of Versailles of the following year undermines belief in the new Weimar Republic, as do further economic woes, like the hyperinflation of 1923. There is a period of free-fall, with terrific hardship and moral disintegration, reflected in the artistic excesses of the Weimar period. Taboos are broken. Erwin hears from a friend, ‘You don’t need much money. Love doesn’t require money. Everything else is meaningless. We have everything here. We have orgies, with girls dancing naked on the tables.’ Deep cynicism prevails. When Erwin looks with disgust at the revolting art in the room, his friend asks, ‘Do you imagine that someone can truly manage to paint this chaotic world? You and I have seen the intestines of living men hanging on barbed-wire fences; under those circumstances, would you choose to paint a snowy landscape?’

Somehow most members of the three families adapt to survive, including the global depression of 1929 (‘Four billion two hundred million marks were now worth a dollar,’ one chapter begins ). Yet the world has turned. Hardworking and thoroughly decent employers like Paul, who manages to survive each bust, never shirking a debt, are no better off or better thought of than the exploitative ones. ‘Decent businessman,’ he is told. ‘That’s a phrase from a bygone era.’

When Hitler takes the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933, Jewish vulnerability is truly exposed. Even so, many remain patriots. Erwin Effinger claims, ‘My homeland is Germany. I’m interested in German history and German art. The Jews from the East are strangers to me. One of my grandfathers fought in ’48. On the other side, my family is from one of the most beautiful regions of Germany, where they may have arrived with the Romans.’ Others realise, as one claims, ‘All national sentiment boils down to antisemitism.’

As the National Socialists tighten control of Germany all but the blinkered are finally forced to confront Marianne’s realisation, ‘I can no longer accept that we are rooted in German culture.’ Herr Hartert is typical of those gentiles who exploit the weakened Jewish position: ‘For his entire life, he had lived in a second-floor apartment next to the Oppner’s villa. For his entire life he had believed that the Jews had all the money.’ Now, richer than them and wanting the villa, he still believes it: ‘He fired every Jew at his bank, pushed out the Jewish councillors.’ By the end of the novel the affluent Jewish society is well on the way to being destroyed. Livelihoods and possessions are being stolen and the message is clear: ‘There was no justice. There was only power.’

Lest we should miss the contemporary significance of The Effingers, Sophie Duvernoy ends her translation with a warning  —in the spirit of Tergit— one cannot but acknowledge. After citing Trump’s attack on democracy in America and the electoral gains of the far-right ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ in Germany, she writes ‘Liberalism is on the wane; state-sanctioned bigotry, disinformation, and political propaganda are rampant. While our times clearly present different conditions from 1930s Germany, the historical parallels are alarming.’ Tragically, since this book has gone to press, we have suffered more of our own anti-Semitic outrages.

An outstanding novel.