“Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers, a novel about three generations of a wealthy German Jewish family”
“How many of us would have the presence of mind to act the same way—to recognize when it’s time to flee our country forever, without hesitating like Lot’s wife on her way out of Sodom? Few German Jews had it in 1933. More typical was the reaction of Victor Klemperer, whose diary of the Nazi years was published in Germany in 1995, thirty-five years after his death, under the title Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I Will Bear Witness). He described the reign of terror after the Nazis’ election victory on March 5, 1933: “It’s astounding how easily everything collapses…. No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid.””
“Lotte Effinger isn’t political; like almost everyone in her wealthy, assimilated clan, she hardly thinks about politics or about being Jewish until the Nazis make it unavoidable. But Tergit was political, and her experience in 1933 underlies Lotte’s story”
“Gabriele Tergit was a pseudonym, adopted by Elise Hirschmann when she began her career as a journalist in the 1920s. Born in Berlin in 1894, she started writing for newspapers while working on a doctorate in history”
“Tergit’s coverage of such trials earned her a place on the Nazis’ enemies list, and on March 4, 1933, a group of storm troopers showed up at her apartment. Her husband, Heinz Reifenberg, an architect, told their maid not to open the door, which Tergit credited with saving her life. The next day she fled to Czechoslovakia, leaving her husband and child behind, like Lotte Effinger”
“The eight-hundred-page novel took more than a decade to write, and by the time it was finished, its subject—the German Jewish bourgeoisie, with all its worldly success, moral confusion, and disastrously false consciousness—had ceased to exist”
“The Holocaust is not narrated in the book, which essentially ends in 1933, with Lotte’s flight and the Nazis’ confiscation of the Effingers’ family business, an auto factory”
““Although Effingers has been described as a ‘Jewish Buddenbrooks’ in scope and may well have taken some initial inspiration from Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel…the comparison only goes so far.” Still, it is impossible to avoid. Starting with the title—a family name, in the plural, with no introductory “the”—Tergit’s book is patterned after Mann’s. Both are rooted in the author’s family history and follow three generations of the family business.”
“Though they take place in different historical eras—Buddenbrooks from the 1830s to the 1870s, Effingers from the 1880s to the 1930s—both books use the fate of a family to make a judgment on modern German society, which sacrifices traditions and values on the altar of profit.”
“Duvernoy is right that comparing Tergit’s novel to Mann’s does the former a disservice. Buddenbrooks is a novel of ideas—above all, the idea that consciousness is a kind of disease”
“The story Tergit has to tell obviously requires a different approach. The Effinger family, too, shows signs of generational decline, but it doesn’t die a natural death; it is destroyed by external forces beyond its control or understanding”
“Tergit is not a novelist of ideas, like Mann, but a journalist who condenses historical and political arguments into digestible summaries.”
“While Effingers has been rediscovered as a lost German Jewish classic, the literary power of the book in 2025 comes less from Tergit’s treatment of Jewish identity or German history than from her exploration of the lives of women”
“Tergit registers the changing zeitgeist through the evolution of furnishings and decorations”
“Tergit is also constantly attentive to clothes, fabrics, and jewelry, and what they communicate about class and gender”
“As things fall apart, the Effingers’ Jewishness, which they once barely noticed, moves to the center of their lives and of the novel. The ferocious return of Jew-hatred is undeniable but so hard to understand that it seems unreal. Just a generation earlier, Germany’s Jews considered themselves the most secure and successfully assimilated in Europe. Now they are back in the Middle Ages”
“Effingers does not explain what happened to the Germans and the Jews. Instead it captures an experience that we are increasingly familiar with today: the bewilderment of watching history go wrong without being able to understand or stop it.”