Review of The Effingers by Gabriel Terget – A vivid portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin | imaginary

IIn 1948, the German Jewish writer Gabriel Terget traveled to Berlin. There, in ruins, was the city where I was born and raised, reported on, and then chronicled in fiction. Terget was one of the shining lights of Berlin’s thriving journalistic scene in the interwar period. She also married into one of the city’s most prominent Jewish families. In 1931, her first novel declared her a literary phenomenon.

Then the Nazis came to power. Tergit was on the enemies list. She fled first to Czechoslovakia, then to Palestine, and finally to London, where she lived from 1938 until her death in 1982. Berlin was never home again. When she visited after the war, she found no real place in the world of conservative postwar German literature—nor a real audience for The Effingers, her recently completed magnum opus. A version was printed in 1951, but was little received. Only recently has a significant rediscovery in Germany made Terget one of the country’s leading authors. Now, thanks to Sophie Duvernoy’s excellent translation, The Effingers appears in English.

The novel follows four generations of the extended Effinger family, Jewish industrialists hidden in Berlin’s high society, from the Bismarck-loving 1870s to the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Its central character, Paul Effinger, heads to Berlin to make his fortune in industry. Paul, an ascetic fascinated by mass production, marries into the elite Opner-Goldschmidt family, as does his brother Karl. The novel follows several members of the extended clan during what is considered the golden age of assimilated Jewish life in Berlin. The city changed profoundly in those decades: rapid population growth, technological advances, massive inequality, and inconsistent progressivism. Ultimately, the political and economic instability of the interwar period brings disaster, as does growing anti-Semitism.

Terget tells all this in sober, precise, dialogue-driven scenes, constructing her narrative from short journalistic chapters that subtly vary in pace as they move between points of view and registers. Her authorial presence does not appear in explanation or reflection, but in what she chooses to show, when, and how. No one point of view is superior to the other. Even the progressively oriented liberal ideals espoused by some of the characters are undermined by quotes that show how women and the poor are often excluded from such optimism.

The Effingers is a wonderfully lively social portrait of pre-Nazi Berlin, its party scenes filled with meticulous descriptions of fashion, food, interior decor and gossip; But it is also an intellectual picture, mainly because its characters think, read and argue. Terget uses the multigenerational form of the novel less to explore family dynamics and more to trace the transitions between successive eras that seem, as her characters constantly say, like the dawning of a new age. The Protestant ethic, industrial utopianism, liberal cosmopolitanism, various versions of Judaism, women’s liberation, nationalism, socialism: all of these elements inhabit the text, often in surprising combinations.

When fascism arrives in the novel, it is surprising and confusing, but it is also in continuity with old tendencies and ideas. With its sociological breadth and historical depth, The Effingers depicts Nazism not as an imaginary triumph of evil over good, but rather as an often incoherent mixture of desires, ideas, and material conditions that led individuals and groups to join the fascist project. Terget prefers detail to abstraction, and detail resists grand explanations.

In 1949, she wrote to a publisher that The Avengers was “not a novel of Jewish destiny, but a Berlin novel in which many people are Jewish.” Essentially, Terget’s novel lays claim to the city as a place for the Jewish people. He categorically rejects the kind of fatalism that insists on the inherent misery, even impossibility, of Jewish life in Germany. He also seems skeptical toward Zionist nationalism as a form of redemption: Uncle Waldemar delivers a heartfelt speech in defense of assimilated Jewish identity against all ethnic nationalisms, accusing the nascent Zionist movement of using “every argument in this dreadful new time for its own purposes.”

Like Paul’s daughter Lotte, Terget traveled to Palestine in 1933. There she found herself far removed from the Zionist immigrants who she felt bore more of an intellectual kinship with German intellectuals of blood and soil than with families like hers: “They saw anyone who traveled to Palestine with a heavy heart as a traitor,” she later wrote. Terget refuses to consider the destruction of Jewish Berlin inevitable. Her novel tells the story of a family, but they won’t let that tragedy define them.