GABRIELE TERGIT The Effingers: A Berlin Saga. Reviewed by Sandra Hogan

A new translation of this German classic tells the story of a Jewish family in Berlin from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.

In 1932, Gabriele Tergit’s Berlin publisher asked her to write a novel about a Jewish family because middle-class Jews were the best customers for books. By the time she finished the saga, in 1948, almost all those book buyers were dead and The Effingers was a flop. German readers rediscovered it in the 1970s and recognised it as a classic. Now, finally, we can read it in English, in an excellent translation by Sophie Duvernoy.

It was worth waiting for.

The Effingers follows three generations of a German-Jewish family from 1878 to 1948. We all know how it must end for this family, but this is not a Holocaust story. The story of the Shoah is not actually told except slantedly at the end. The main story finishes in 1933, with the escape from Germany of Lotte, the wonderfully vivid central character who shares some of Tergit’s own experiences and ideas.

The story begins with Paul Effinger, who leaves a pleasant, traditional life in the fictitious country town of Kragsheim, to go to Berlin and make his fortune. There, with his brother Karl, he becomes an early car manufacturer. Paul and his brother both marry into the elite Oppner-Goldschmidt family and start a clan of diverse people who live through the rise of industrialism, nationalism, World War I, and the Weimar era’s experiment with democracy. They experience and discuss the avant-garde art scene, decadent cabaret, and the rise of social work, feminism, Marxism and Nazism.

Tergit brings alive the dinner parties, the clubs, the conversations about politics and ideas, the clothes and food and personalities of each generation. The twentieth-century Effingers were born into wealth and high society and they lost the consuming work and moral ethics of their parents; this generation includes idlers, an embezzler, a handsome seducer, and Lotte, an actress who was notorious among her aunts for visiting a man in his room.

World War I is the turning point of the story, told most vividly through the brutal war experiences of Karl’s son Erwin, who endures trench warfare before being captured and held in a French prisoner of war camp, and making an escape that is both daring and realistic. Erwin later marries cousin Lotte. Erwin speaks for those disillusioned with Germany and with humanity in general.

Although Tergit moves briefly through the horrors of trench warfare, she brings it to life in scenes like this:

It was November: damp, cold and dirty. Nothing had changed in years. Only death still strolled between the trenches. Erwin sat next to his favourite comrade, a pimp from Cologne. Though he was an even more blatant thief than the others, he was frightfully decent otherwise. Their old lives were long over. Their fat rat hadn’t returned since yesterday. They sat there and felt afraid. The shelter might collapse at any moment. But death usually came the moment one stepped out or went to fetch food.

The lieutenant said ‘Volunteers for a message.’ Erwin and the man from Cologne stepped forward.

Throughout the book, even in the trenches, she shows how the incendiary ideas of the times – nationalism, Marxism, anti-Semitism, revolution – permeated all levels of society:

While Erwin is in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia with nothing to eat but white beans, a newspaper page drifts over the electrified barbed-wire fence:

Erwin picked it up. The czar was dead. The Russian proletariat called on the proletariat of all other countries to lay down their weapons and fight against the capitalists. ‘For all!’ cried the newspaper. ‘Peace!’ cried the newspaper. ‘An end to senseless sacrifice!’ Erwin gathered his fellow prisoners and read them the page, over and over again, until a guard came along. He crumpled it up and threw it in the dirt bucket.

After the war, we witness the decline of the economy and the politics of Germany as well as the decline of the Effinger family. The Effingers’ Jewishness has been important to them in a family and cultural sense, although after the move from Kragsheim, none of them are religious. As Germany falls apart, their Jewishness becomes significant in a new and bewildering way. Jew hatred takes them by surprise, especially as they have always believed in the liberal humanism and acceptance that Germany represented for them.

Gabriele Tergit is the pen name of Elise Hirschmann, daughter of industrialist Siegfried Hirschmann, who was a pioneer in the car industry, like Paul Effinger. She studied history before becoming a freelance journalist and then a staff writer for the Berliner Tageblatt, a daily paper with liberal values. She was the paper’s first female court reporter and, like Australia’s Helen Garner, she became widely appreciated for her articles depicting legal stories from a human perspective.

Tergit’s coverage of the political assassinations committed by far-right nationalists earned her a place on Goebbels’ hit list. The SA troops knocked at her door on the eve of the 1933 elections. Tergit’s husband, Heinz Reifenberg, instructed the maid not to open the door, winning Tergit hours to pack a bag and flee the country. She lived in Prague and Palestine before finally settling in London with Heinz and their son Peter.

Tergit kept writing The Effingers all through the war, drawing on her memory, research articles, and family stories. She never lived in Germany again.

Sophie Duvernoy, a literary scholar as well as a translator, has written an interesting and thoughtful afterword to the book, giving background on Tergit’s life and writing, aspects of German-Jewish culture, and her approach to the translation task.

In a final note, she writes that completing this translation project in July 2025 felt both fitting and unsettling. Referring to the actions of the first Trump presidency, she comments:

Liberalism is on the wane; state-sanctioned bigotry, disinformation, and political propaganda are rampant. While our times clearly present different conditions from 1930s Germany, the historical parallels are alarming.

Tergit offers a guide through this muddled landscape. Her work as a journalist led her to reject black-and-white narratives, clear-cut solutions, and ready-made ideology. Instead she offers an honest depiction of the harshness and complexity of living in difficult times, while simultaneously championing equality, liberalism, and critical thought.

Tergit saw England as the guardian of the liberal tradition that had failed in Germany and she lived there for the rest of her life. The Effingers is often compared to that beloved English family saga The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. One detail that charms me about Tergit’s London life is that she wrote on a table, bought at auction, which had belonged to John Galsworthy.

Gabriele Tergit The Effingers: A Berlin Saga, translated by Sophie Duvernoy, Pushkin Press 2025 864pp $49.99

Sandra Hogan is the author of bestselling non-fiction spy story With My Little Eye. Her memoir My Mother’s Secret will be published by Allen & Unwin in 2027.

You can buy The Effingers from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. You can also buy it from Booktopia. We receive a small commission if you purchase through these links.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.