Goodbye to Berlin – a lost Jewish Germany is brought back to life in an epic saga - The Jewish Chronicle

The war is over. Peace has settled upon the land. The country in which you live is stable, cohesive, governed by the rule of law. The old prejudices that once oppressed you are not vanished, far from it, but they are broadly in abeyance, an obsession chiefly confined to the political fringes. It is not so much that you are a citizen first and a Jew second. More that, now your society no longer agitates to set one identity against the other, you feel no need to do so either. Your values, whether liberal or conservative, are underpinned by a solid, unselfconscious patriotism. You are, in short, assimilated. It is the realisation of a certain Jewish ideal, the dream of Baruch Spinoza come to pass.

This is not the Britain of the mid-20th century, but Germany, 70 years earlier. It is where Gabriele Tergit’s epic of German Jewish life, The Effingers, commences. In many ways this is a traditional family saga to place alongside other such doorstop volumes, albeit in the first rank: 800 pages tracing the fortunes of an affluent dynasty, its ambitions, affairs, marriages, triumphs, tragedies, passions, betrayals, across the sweep of time and history. In one particular way, it is quite unlike any other, and that is in the way it has to end. We know what is coming. Its protagonists cannot. Until it is too late, few can even guess, let alone believe it. That is the shadow that lies across the entire book, the shadow of our own hindsight, and it is a tribute to Tergit’s achievement that we may from time to time be so caught up in the lives of her characters as to forget it. She herself did not know the ending when she began writing it: that was in 1932, at the encouragement of a publisher, perhaps inspired by Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, who noted that Germany’s Jews were its pre-eminent reading public.

The Effingers was eventually completed in 1951 – that is, in mid-20th century Britain, after all. Its author, whose own upper-class German Jewish background is reflected in its milieu, escaped the Nazis by a whisker and fled to Palestine before making her home here. Its rediscovery and republication, in a very fine translation by Sophie Duvernoy, is timely. Few British Jews will be able to read it today without a shudder of recognition at things we might only a few years ago have assumed consigned to another country and another era.

A Place at the table: the Jewish-owned department store Leiser in Berlin in 1927. In the late 19th century large-scale retailing in Germany was dominated by JewsGetty Images

Although titled after one family, The Effingers is the story of two. The Effingers themselves, from southern Germany, are of the respectable artisan classes. Their stolid, amiable patriarch, Mathias, is a watchmaker whose aspiring sons make their way north to reinvent themselves as industrialists – and in so doing help to reinvent the country that will duly turn upon them. Ben, who does not trust that German antisemitism has been laid to rest, will emigrate and become an emblematic Englishman of the age. The novel centres instead on Karl, effervescent and extravagant, and the self-denying, diligent and principled Paul. They go to Berlin, the Prussian capital, now emerging as the political and economic heart of a new major power. Here their lives become intertwined with those of the Oppners, wealthy metropolitans behind an old and reputable finance house. They will meet their respective matches in the daughters of Emmanuel and Selma Oppner: Annette (beautiful, snobbish, frivolous, but possessed of untapped depths of character), and the more down-to-earth Klärchen, who delights in the Effingers’ provincial roots as much as her older sister disdains them. Paul and Klärchen’s daughter, Lotte, will serve as Tergit’s avatar in the novel.

Tergit is a narrator of considerable subtlety, in all but one regard, which is a fault common to the genre: a tendency of characters to speak in exposition when discussing politics or current events, as if reading from prepared lectures. By contrast, their everyday dialogue rings true, as does Tergit’s episodic structure, stringing the saga together in scenes lasting minutes, hours or, at most, days, before jumping in time to the next. She relates events with a matter-of-fact directness that becomes ever more effective as fear and horror creep in to the tale – a cloud no larger than a man’s hand – against which she sets off occasional lightning flashes of sardonic wit or descriptive brilliance that freeze the moment in the mind’s eye. Of one character, selecting a bridal trousseau, she will write, “It took her longer to choose each nightgown than to choose her husband”. Of another, succumbing to the influenza pandemic: “At the age of nineteen . . . that robust, vibrant boy who had burst into life as if fired from a pistol, had ceased to exist.” A further skill of Tergit’s is the conjuring of time and place. James Joyce famously said of Ulysses that he aimed “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book”. The Berlin, or rather the different Berlins, in The Effingers is not far away from such a goal, and perhaps more in need of it. We see the city – not just its buildings, but its tastes, its customs, its mores – in its burgeoning days under Bismarck, in the violent chaos of the November Revolution, in the decadence of the Weimar Republic, the last a picture more multifaceted than the popular image received from Christopher Isherwood via the film Cabaret, which drew loosely from his semi- autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin. For all the rhetoric placed uncomfortably in the characters’ mouths, we obtain a persuasive summary of political and social change from their choices, their inner lives, their acts of defiance or compromise or corruption.

Perhaps the most telling thing of all is the way the principal characters’ sense of their own Jewishness increases with the hostility of their surroundings. At the start, it is incidental, mentioned by the author or by themselves in passing. Only Waldemar Goldschmidt, brother of Selma and son of Emmanuel’s late business partner, is materially affected by antisemitism, which curtails his academic career when he refuses on principle to publicly renounce Judaism despite having long since abandoned it in private. What is permitted to fester in the academy will one day infect the polity; for Judaism then, read Zionism now – the paper-thin proxy by which to assail Jewish life, the repudiation of which, as in 15th-century Spain, inevitably serves only as a temporary appeasement. In time, the preening intellectual antisemites and the street-thug Jew-baiters will be a wolf-pack united in their common cause, the distinction between them one entirely without a difference; nor will the wolves distinguish between the converted, the secular, and the observant.

The Effingers is a magnificent book, one that in happier (or perhaps more naive) times Jewish readers might have enjoyed, like any other readers, for its outstanding merits as a historical novel, even given its terrible destination. Today, it reads as a warning. It couldn’t happen here? This story shows you that it could happen anywhere. It just happened to be there, among what Lotte’s cousin Marianne protests to the last are “decent people”.

You find yourself wondering at exactly which point, on the grim course Tergit charts with such precision, we now find ourselves – and how much further along we might drift before we, too, need abandon Spinoza’s dream and escape to the place we first came from.

The Effingers

By Gabriele Tergit, translated by Sophie Duvernoy

Pushkin Press

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