2023-11-24 13:46:00
The Livres de Libédossier notebookIn her saga, the author Gabriele Tergit (1894, 1982) follows four generations of German Jews and brings back a vanished world.
“Is the powder good?” asks Lotte, one of the main characters of Gabriele Tergit. The young Berliner, an actress, took the first train to the Czech mountains. It is early 1933. At the hotel, we are dancing. Tea for two is on the radio. To the acquaintance who apostrophes “– Ah, Mrs. Oppen, What a pleasure! Winter sports, do you too?” , she does not dare say that she is on the run; “That was not a proper response.” A few hours earlier she was kicked out because she was Jewish from the theater where she worked. A colleague warned her, advised her to cross the border as quickly as possible, the National Socialist council of the establishment called a commando. “You will be arrested shortly – in other words: beaten to death.”
The author of Effinger, a Berlin saga, experienced this situation, or almost. In February 33. the winter of literature by Uwe Wittstock, the name of Gabriele Tergit appeared several times. The German author recounted how the SA had arrived at the latter’s home on March 5, 1933, demanding that she open. The husband had the door armored and the novelist and famous legal columnist had time to telephone the chief of the political police and thus escape arrest. The same day, she packed a suitcase and left for the Czech Giant Mountains and a fifteen-year exile.
Stock-listed automobile factory
The Effinger, a large novel of 900 pages, is fiction, but the author has nourished it with her family history. Born Elise Hirschmann, she belonged to a lineage which, like the Paul Effinger of the novel, went into business, developing a listed automobile factory. And the houses with the Proustian splendor of the book, in the Tiergarten district, closely resemble those she frequented as a child and then as a young wife. This saga of a vanished world, that of assimilated Berlin Jews, covers a wide period: from 1878 to 1948. Four generations of characters appear there, subjects of three emperors, struck by major historical events: economic crises, the War of 14-18, the Spanish flu, the rise of Nazism.
Parents and children confront each other, argue and we thus sweep away a beautiful panorama of currents of thought, from the period of Bismarck to the more Babylonian period of the Weimar Republic. Feminist, socialist and Zionist ideas penetrate this solid and wealthy family body through the youngest voices. We debate in particular during family celebrations. Marianne (third generation) is the most receptive to new ideas. Rather than marrying, she preferred to devote herself to social affairs, but this did not prevent her dismissal by the Nazis from her civil servant position.
The half-timbered house of the watchmaker grandfather
Gabriele Tergit portrays a host of figures, modeled on Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The main ones are Lotte, her father Paul Effinger, the enterprising captain of industry and the great-uncle Waldemar Goldschmidt, an intellectual specializing in law, an enlightened conscience of this chaotic era. The novelist changes points of view, moving from serious stories to more futile ones. In this elegant world, it is also a question of house arrangements, the creation of pantagruelian menus, the acquisition of hats and sentimental coquetry. This is the essence of a saga and it would not be if it remained confined to the Prussian puritanism of great-grandmother Selma.
Another decor provides a counterpoint to these urban splendors. The Effinger brothers, Paul and Karl, allied by marriage to the very distinguished Oppner-Goldschmidt of Berlin, are in fact the children of a much simpler man, a watchmaker from southern Germany. There the link to Jewish tradition is stronger, more intimate. In her afterword, Nicole Henneberg recalls that Gabriele Tergit’s maternal ancestors came from the Augsburg region and that by depicting the half-timbered house with Father Effinger’s watchmaking workshop, “she erects to her grandparents a memorial of great symbolic significance. The value of this book lies largely in its testimony dimension. The novelist had started writing it in 1932, she continued it in exile, in Palestine then in London, she had difficulty getting it published after the war. The afterword reproduces lines she wrote in 1948: “What I would like is for all German Jews to say: ‘Yes, that’s how we were, that’s how we lived between 1878 and 1939” and put the book in the hands of their children saying, “So you know what it was like.”
Gabriele Tergit, the Effingers. A Berlin saga, translated from German by Rose Labourie, afterword by Nicole Henneberg, Christian Bourgois publisher, 944 pp., €30 (ebook: €22.99).
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