Gone with the Wind in Berlin

Written by Gabriele Tergit (Berlin, 1894-London, 1982), Effinger is one of those summer novels, voluminous and downpour, the reader waits for to get their teeth into 900 pages when the clocks play in their favor. First published in 1951, the work did not find the desired resonance at the time, perhaps because German society at that time was not ready enough to take on a voice with different nuances and thus fit it into a three-dimensional portrait far from the war, after the war. The generalized view that Jews should be treated exclusively as pure and noble people, beyond any intellectual pessimism. Tergit himself, who began writing this story in 1932, is at the peak of his career as a journalist and author of the first feature film Kasebier Conquers Berlin (Minuscule, 2010), a clever and entertaining book about the crazy years of the German capital and the spirit of the Weimar Republic , explained that in his own time, Effinger was not a novel about the tragic fate of European Jews, but about Berlin, featuring dozens of characters who turned out to be of Semitic descent. It was reprinted with great success in Germany in 2019 and is now seeing the light translated into Spanish thanks to Libros del Asteroides.

At its core, Effiners resembles Buddenbrooks, another historical family epic by Thomas Mann, which chronicles the ups and downs of a four-generation Lübeck merchant family between 1835 and 1877. Tergit’s book began precisely in 1878, a year later as if it were a literary succession. Beginning as a domestic novel, with a clear nod to the flow of German history, with barely the word Jew in the first two hundred pages, the novel becomes a convincing political portrait. The unparalleled autonomy the author managed to refer to what was happening in Berlin at the time also makes it one of those wonderful works that must be read to understand the spirit of an era and a lost world. His characters are drawn without prejudice, and while the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the 19th century are not concealed or neglected, Tergit takes it upon himself to sublime by showing how being Jewish did not play a decisive role in Germany before the early 1930s. they are at the door of power, the views towards them are getting aggressive and changing dramatically. Only the brutally distorted story of the collective begins to alarm the community, and the hatred of some Germans towards others is revealed when the perception of previous years was absent.

Over four generations, from 1878 to 1948, Tergit chronicles a family history of the upper-class Berlin Jewish community. A letter from one of its main protagonists, Paul Effinger, a 17-year-old teenager from the Effinger family of watchmakers in the small town of Kragsheim, serves as the starting point for what happens next. Then he is still an avid learner; In 1942, at the age of 81, he turned into a successful industrialist, waiting to be sent to an extermination camp. “I believed in the goodness of man,” he writes in his last letter, resignedly. “The mistake was the deepest mistake of my life. Now we’ll both pay for it with death,” he admits, swallowing regretfully for not listening to his wife, Klarita, who wanted to break up and yet, in her own words, plunged him into unimaginable misfortune.

Effiners, for most of its pages, the most striking are World War I and the Wilhelm era, the Weimar Republic and the period of inflation, the Nazis in power and the Second World War. Successive political and social upheavals are reflected in the lives of the heroes, from simple watchmakers to shopkeepers, bankers and big industrialists. Although religion plays only a secondary role in this family saga, it’s a broad spectrum from the devout Jew to the devout Jew. Towards the end, however, one wonders if it really had an impact on what’s going on. The usual risks of an existence in staggering and changing times are those that are central to the story told in The Effingers. For example, while the liberation of women takes place in the chronological order of the novel, the institution of marriage begins to falter; It takes the long and traditional road that belongs to the upper bourgeoisie to other kinds of decision. For the self-confident woman, not being married or not having a girlfriend at some point ceases to be a problem. The author never loses the pulse of the narrative, which is of great value for dealing with so many pages. The novel is continued with rich dialogue, small stories that fit together like a glove, without major embellishments, told in short chapters and with extraordinarily sharp detail. This is where the author’s good journalism training is most evident. However, in a work with so many characters, it is recommended to go to the published family tree from time to time in order not to get lost.

Born as Elise Hirschmann in 1894, Gabriele Tergit was a free-thinking German Jewish intellectual who wrote for the centre-left newspaper Berliner Tageblatt for a decade until the early 1930s, when the threat of the Nazi regime was imminent. On March 5, 1933, at the age of 39, just as Kasebier was beginning to enjoy the great success of his conquest of Berlin, a commando of stormtroopers broke into his apartment to arrest him. Tergit manages to escape first to Czechoslovakia, then to Palestine, and then settles in London, where he will live until his death in 1982. Effingers are the product of exile; For eighteen years he was written in Prague, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and hotel rooms in the British capital, straining his memory to try to breathe from the lost world of his youth. She returns to Berlin for the first time in 1948. This is the visit he speaks of in the somber epilogue of his novel. She carries the last of the five manuscripts with her. Two were destroyed in bombing raids, one in Paris and the other in Munich. He finds a devastated city where its former inhabitants have planted seeds in their gardens and are skeptical that they will ever truly sprout. Tergit, on the other hand, did not hesitate to wait for parents to give their monumental novels to their children so that they would learn what it was like that wiped out the most tragic wind of history.

Source: Informacion

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