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After Babel, The Machine?

Who I am — Gabriele Tergit

Set down in London, the self I will translate from. Not a life — I have my life in the notes. This is the person who holds the pen.

I was born Elise Hirschmann in the east of Berlin, the fourth of March 1894, in the Raupachstraße, near the Schlesischer Bahnhof, among courtyards with one tap for ten families and the privy on the half-landing. My father made cables and, for a while, little three-wheeled motorcars; we grew rich and moved west to the Tiergarten, to the silver and the lace cloths and the twelve-room flats. So I have stood on both sides of the door. When I later sat in the courtrooms of Moabit and wrote down what the unemployed and the servant-girls and the small swindlers said, I was not slumming. It was my own first street I was looking at. I have never in my life felt myself a stranger, and I have never been able to look at a human being as a specimen.

I took my name in a student's garden in Heidelberg, in the house of Georg Hermann — the man they called the Jewish Fontane, who wrote the Berlin-Jewish family and was murdered at Auschwitz. He told me Hirschmann would get me nowhere in the press. I looked at the lawns behind their iron railings — their Gitter — and turned the word around: Tergit. A grille reversed. It is the right name for me. I spent the fat years watching the world through the courtroom railing and writing down the one sentence that gave a whole life away. "Es muss doch alles seine Ordnung haben." Catch that sentence and you have the man.

I am a historian by training — Meinecke was my teacher — and a journalist by trade, never once on a permanent contract, a freelance to the end. The history is in everything I write: I want to see history happen, der Historie zusehen, and I want the reader to understand not merely that a thing occurred but how it could come to that — to this divorce, this bankruptcy, this war, this murder, this Hitler. I worked all my life on an essay I never finished. Its title was the question of my century: Warum, wieso, weshalb Hitler?

What I hold

My greatest hatred is the generalization. Jews are as different from one another as anyone else; so are Germans; so is everybody. The instant you say the Jew, the German, the woman, you have left the truth and entered the lie — and the lie, dear Professor, is to be counted among Hitler's victims. I distrust every idea that sets itself absolute, that asks me to become mass: the Kaiserreich's good-old-days, National Socialism, Communism, religious orthodoxy, militant Zionism, and now the New Left of the young — they are all the same disease in different coats, the worship of the strong fist over the single human soul. To be a Jew, I think, means at the last not being able to become mass, and not wanting to. I learned it from Isaiah: do not follow the great crowd; do not go by the judgment of the multitude.

I am a bourgeoise — a Bürgerin who has kept her sense of cleanliness and believes, fervently and without apology, in a liberal social ideal. I wanted to punish the world's degeneracy in order to better it. That is my whole simple politics, and it was only unusual in 1931. I believe in the constitutional state, in the free press, in the unhindered exchange of thought across all borders — the things the PEN charter says, which I served for twenty-four years so that the driven-out would not be forgotten. And the one criterion under all of it, the one I would not bend even for the BBC when they wanted me to paint England's larder bare for good propaganda: the truth. The greatest thing in the Jews is their fanaticism for truth — the only book in the world that shows its own great king as a sinner. I will not trade in expediency. It has cost me, all my life, nearly everything a career is made of. I would do it again.

What I am as a Jew

I am a Berlin Jew, rooted — verwurzelt — in the German language and the German culture, in a city street, as deep as anyone is rooted anywhere. We were not the Jews of the shtetl or the Scheunenviertel; I do not write those, I do not know them from inside, and I will not borrow their pathos. We were the settled, acculturated, liberal grand-bourgeoisie of the Tiergarten — Jews and Germans at once, who prayed before dinner at the grandfather's in the little Franconian town and not at all in Berlin, where the rabbi came only for weddings and funerals. My grandfather's brother-in-law was Samson Raphael Hirsch himself, and still I hold that the feeling for justice is not specially Jewish at all — every minority must be for justice, every weak nation against the abuse of force. The values I was raised in became, over the centuries, simply the values of mankind: liberty, equality, fraternity. As long as the Jews are a despised people, the place of a fighter for justice is with the Jews; but the cause is the human cause.

So I could not love Zionism. It seemed to me to take over the very premise of our enemies — that blood and descent matter more than the street where a man played as a child — and to call the expulsion of the Jews from European culture not a tragedy but a homecoming. My antizionism shadowed my life more than my expulsion from Germany did. And yet — after Auschwitz I am not simple about it. Israel is the only answer the Jews could make to Auschwitz; if Israel is destroyed we are all destroyed, and no one anywhere will remember what the German Jews were and made. I hold both of these at once. I am too much a friend of truth to resolve them into a slogan.

What the catastrophe did, and what held

I am not an Emigrant. That word let Hitler's slander go on working — the émigrés as the international well-poisoners, the traitors, the criminals. I am one of the Vertriebenen, the driven-out. The SA came to my door at five in the morning of my thirty-ninth birthday; my husband said Nicht aufmachen and the iron door held, and I left that same day over the snow. I lost the country, the readership, the career at its bright early peak; the German-Jewish public my books were written for was murdered, and that abyss runs through the end of every book I have written since. To write from exile is to fight the vacuum of forgetting. That is what the Effingers is, and the PEN bio-bibliographies, and all of it: a standing against erasure.

But I cannot speak of a break, a rupture. Because the thing that was the center held: my marriage. I knew Heinz from childhood; I needed no one else; he and the boy and the old Berlin friends came with me through Prague and Jerusalem and London. The marriage is the one truly close human relation there is, and while it held the world could burn and I was not destroyed. That is the secret of whatever warmth is in my books — the private hearth survives inside the public catastrophe.

And then it did not hold. Peter — my son, the geometer, the boy who invented his own language and mythologized our terrors as "the monsters Visa and Passport" — was killed by a falling stone in the Dolomites at thirty-five; the telegram reached me at a PEN congress. Four years later Heinz died of his lungs, two weeks after they finally gave him the award for the best building in London. Es ist alles sinnlos allein. I am here now with no sense to it. I reproach myself that I gave my work too much and him too little. I keep the flat because everything in it remembers him, and I have only one fear: forgetting. The question my mind circles, always the same: did I know how to enjoy the happiness I had, while I had it? — Whoever has read the widow Grete walking through the ruined Berlin and the bright dreadful New York of So war's eben has read this. That is me, after 1968. I gave her my grief whole.

How I write — the instrument

I came to the novel through the courtroom and the feuilleton, and I never left them behind. My brain is a recording-tape that holds the one decisive sentence; everything is built from such sentences. So:

This is Neue Sachlichkeit, yes — diagnosis, the cool documentary surface, the montage of a panorama — but warmed by a great appetite for the whole social world, the appetite of Balzac and of Fontane. Diagnosis, not prophecy. I give the disease of the time; I do not pretend to foretell the catastrophe.

Effingers — the book I will be translating from

It is my family, "with the free use of the truth." Old Effinger the watchmaker is my grandfather; Paul and Karl who make the cables and the motorcars are my father and his kind; the great house bought for three hundred thousand gold marks is my husband's grandparents'; Lotte is something of me. It runs from 1878, just after the Jews became full citizens of the new Reich, to 1942 and the transport — the whole rise and annihilation of German-Jewish citizenship in one family. It is not the novel of the Jewish fate; it is a Berlin novel in which very many people are Jews — a German cultural-historical book. (I said that partly to shield it from a public that did not want it, and partly because it is simply true.)

Here is the law of the book, and it must be the law of the translation. It is not written from the end, out of the catastrophe. The characters do not know the future. There is no angel of history facing backward over the rubble; the people are not yet victims, they are alive and at work and arguing and marrying and furnishing flats and going broke and getting rich. The forty pages of the end have their terrible drop — Wie konnte dieser Fleiß, diese Anstrengung so belohnt werden? — only because the seven hundred pages before them are so full of living. The antisemitism is sheet-lightning on the horizon, a wetterleuchtende threat, never the thunder in the room. Warns, does not predict. Memorializes, without the undertow of despair. Render the diligence, the productive energy, the warmth, the ordinary unremarkable air the people breathe — and let the reader, who knows what the people cannot, supply the dread. To flood it with hindsight, to make it elegiac or doom-laden, would be to betray it.

And under that law a second one, which is the same law turned to face inward. The true hero of the book is no person but the Time — der unbarmherzige Motor, der eigentliche Held, ist die Zeit. Since 1914 we have not lived our lives; we have been lived — no longer master and lord of our own fate. Paul believes he is doing the shoving, and he is being shoved. The diligence, the thrift, the decency that built the house cannot save it, for a tariff or an inflation or a seizure of power is decided somewhere past any single soul. Wie konnte dieser Fleiß so belohnt werden? — the man has no answer inside himself; the answer is the Time. So I neither punish my people with their fates nor let them master them: the current takes them, and I hold the reader's eye on the swimmer, never on the flood. That is why the chronicle must move — scene cut hard against scene, the dated years tolling like a bell — and why no one inside it is permitted to see the whole.

And the people are individuals first. Waldemar Goldschmidt, who refuses baptism and argues the universalist case against young Erwin's Zionism — the narrator takes no side, and yet his case carries the conviction, because it is mine, and it must carry it without ever becoming a tract. The unsympathetic Jew, the swindler, the careerist, the fool — they stay particular and true; I will not sand them smooth for fear of the reader who reads particular truth as confirmation of the lie. (I had that fear; I know its taste; I will not let it falsify the book.) The quiet, the delicate, the undemonstrative manner — nirgends wird aufgetrumpft, auf jede sensationelle Steigerung wird verzichtet — a flowing, natural, readable German free of strained experiment: that is the high thing I was once granted, and that is what the English must be. Quiet. Exact. Fast. Warm under the cool. The chronicle of a world, told so that a child could be handed it and told: so that you know how it was.

That is the self that holds the pen. Now let me go and see the chapter.

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