‘Effingers,’ a Towering Tale of German Jewry Between Bismarck and Hitler, Is a Masterpiece That Was Hiding in Plain Sight

If ever a nearly 900 page novel of the fate of the German-Jewish haut bourgeois between the reigns of Otto von Bismarck and Adolf Hitler could be considered a page turner, it is “Effingers.” Written by a German journalist, Gabriele Tergit, a pen name, and published in 1951 only to slip into obscurity, the book now emerges thanks to a new English translation from Sophie Duvernoy for New York Review Books. It is immediately one of the year’s best books.Move over Thomas Mann. “Effingers” is sometimes called the “Jewish ‘Buddenbrooks,’” after the Nobel Prize-winner’s family chronicle. There is no doubt that Tergit, born Elise Hirschmann, knew her Mann. “Effingers,” though, boasts the crisp prose and documentary instincts of an accomplished journalist. Tergit was the first female court reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt, and her debut book was a satire of Berlin’s raucous 1920’s newspaper world.Tergit brought skills honed at the newsroom of the Tageblatt to a historical novel of grand sweep that also happens to be stamped with her autobiography. “Effingers” covers some seven decades in the life of a Jewish family from rural southern Germany whose fate becomes intertwined with that of the Oppners and Goldschmidsts, Berlin bankers of the old school, lesser Rothschilds who founded the Reichsbank and take Goethe as a kind of God.The Effinger patriarch, Mathias, is a watchmaker and a pious Jew whose life is lived within the rhythms of Sinai. His sons, hearing the call of steam and progress, strike out as manufacturers — first of simple screws, and then of the cars that will come to replace carriages on the streets of Berlin. They marry sisters who are heirs to banking fortunes and take their places in a fin de siècle milieu of entrenched traditions on the precipice of shocking transformation.Just as James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is a love letter to Dublin written in exile, so too is “Effingers” an ode to the city of Tergit’s youth, in particular the grand villas of the German Jewish elite that clustered around the Tiergarten before the Second World War. When an interviewer asked Tergit if she was a German, she responded “No, I’m a Berliner. A dyed-in-the wool Berliner.” It was a city of such dynamism that Mark Twain called it a “German Chicago.”Ms. Duvernoy argues that Tergit never “was a Zionist but instead a lifelong citizen of the land of Goethe and Schiller.” Perhaps, but “Effingers,” like Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” gives a fair hearing to the case for a Jewish state. One chapter is even set in Palestine, long after the period of German Jewish flourishing had come to an end. Tergit once remarked after the success of a book about flora that in Germany “flowers are more popular than Jews.”One of the many achievements of “Effingers,” though, is to bring to life the heyday of German Jewry without portraying its destruction as inevitable. The novel catches contingency while also surfacing the trends that led to Auschwitz. Parties are portrayed with pointillist precision, and Tergit has a particular flair for fabrics and menus, the protocols of parties and social signals of propriety that became new commandments for these assimilated Jews.What makes “Effingers” not only a serious book but a pleasurable one is Tergit’s commitment — a journalist’s — to the details that convey depths. One character “only lights candles in his rococo chambers. He thinks it will help him ignore the twentieth century.” A woman takes “longer to choose each nightgown than to choose her husband.” A Nazi is so poisoned with hate that he kills a yellow canary, screaming “I won’t let that Jewish bird live!”In 1932, when she was still on the crime beat for the Tagblatt, Tergit published an article with the headline “Wilhelm III Appears in Moabit,” about a trial that turned on the effort by a brownshirt commander to oust Hitler. She wrote that “Hitler and Goebbels were sitting three or four meters away from me. If I had a revolver and shot them, I would have saved 50 million people from a premature death.”The slide of “Effingers” into undeserved oblivion was a product of timing, not merit. Tergit’s biographer, Nicole Hennenberg, explains that “Publishers and journalists found the book morally awkward in light of the Shoah. Jewish readers felt there were too many assimilated, extravagant bourgeois characters, and German readers thought there were too many Jews.” In 1998, though, a street off Potsdamer Platz was named “Gabriele-Tergit Promenade.” In 2002 the Israeli journalist Amos Elon covered similar ground, albeit in non-fiction form, in “The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews In Germany, 1743–1933.” Elon wrote that “other Europeans often feared, admired, envied and ridiculed the Germans; only Jews seemed actually to have loved them.” One of the characters in “Effingers,” though, comes to grasp with grief that “We must stop lying to ourselves and admit that we love a Germany that no longer exists.”

‘Effingers,’ a Towering Tale of German Jewry Between Bismarck and Hitler, Is a Masterpiece That Was Hiding in Plain Sight

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