# The library

### What each instance read — the complete reading list, arm by arm

> The personas in this experiment were never given style rules. They were given **reading**. This page names every text each instance was given to read before it translated, so that the source of each translator's "voice" is fully transparent. The works themselves are under copyright and are **not** reproduced here — they are named, not copied. Where a work is in the public domain it is freely findable elsewhere; where it is not, this is a citation, not a reprint.

Six of the seven arms are AI; the seventh, **H**, is the published human translation. The arms differ along a *persona-source axis*. Two of them — the controls **C** and **C-let** — read nothing but the novel itself. Three — **A**, **B**, and **D** — each read a corpus first and built a translator-persona from it. Below is a side-by-side map of who read what, followed by the full annotated lists.

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## The map — who read what

| Reading group | A | B | C | C-let | D-let / D-aim |
|---|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|
| Tergit's own works (5) | ● | ● | — | — | ● |
| Scholarship & reference on Tergit | — | ● | — | — | ● |
| German peers & contemporaries | — | ● | — | — | ● |
| German literary tradition | — | ● | — | — | ● |
| Period & cultural context | — | ● | — | — | ● |
| Anglophone reference novelists | — | — | — | — | ● |
| Inherited frame — Sophie Duvernoy's writing | ● | — | — | — | — |
| *Effingers* — the full novel (Step 3) | ● | ● | ● | ● | ● |

**A** inherited its interpretive frame from an established human translator's writing on Tergit and did *not* perform the self-built German research. **B** built its own frame from the German corpus, walled off from any writing by that translator. **D** read everything B read *plus* a set of anglophone novelists — its one distinguishing addition; **D-let** and **D-aim** share a single identical corpus and reading, and diverge only at the translation step. **C** and **C-let** read the novel and nothing else — no corpus, no persona. Not shown in the table is **H**, the novel's published translator (Sophie Duvernoy, New York Review Books, 2025), who brought a lifetime of reading no document can enumerate; no constructed corpus is listed for her.

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## 1. Tergit's own works — the primary corpus

*Read in full by A, B, and D (Step 1) — five works, in roughly compositional order:*

- *Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm* — novel, 1931
- *Im Schnellzug nach Haifa* — reportage, 1933
- *So war's eben* — family-saga novel (drafted 1930s–40s)
- *Der erste Zug nach Berlin* — novel (postwar)
- *Etwas Seltenes überhaupt* — memoir (late)

## 2. Scholarship & reference on Tergit

*Read by B and D (Step 2):*

- Banki — *„Sucker"? Chronistin und Kritikerin der Moderne* (2024)
- Boa — *Modernity and German-Jewish Identity in* Effingers (2018)
- Volkening — review essay, *Arbitrium* (2006)
- Wagener — *Gestohlene Jahre* (2013)
- Reference: the FemBio profile of Tergit; the German and English Wikipedia entries.

## 3. German peers & contemporaries

*Read by B and D — the writers around her:*

- Egon Erwin Kisch — *Aus Prager Gassen und Nächten* (1912)
- Egon Erwin Kisch — *Der Fall Redl* (1924)
- Walter Benjamin — *Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert*
- Kurt Tucholsky — *Schloß Gripsholm* (1931)
- Briefing notes on Else Lasker-Schüler, Georg Hermann, Joseph Roth, Kurt Tucholsky, Walter Benjamin, and Walther Rathenau.

## 4. German literary tradition

*Read by B and D — the realist–bourgeois line Tergit writes within:*

- Theodor Fontane — *L'Adultera* (1882), *Schach von Wuthenow* (1882), *Frau Jenny Treibel* (1892), *Effi Briest* (1895), *Der Stechlin* (1898)
- Heinrich Mann — *Professor Unrat* (1905), *Der Untertan* (1918)
- Thomas Mann — *Buddenbrooks* (1901)

## 5. Period & cultural context

*Read by B and D — encyclopedic briefings on the world of the novel:* the German Empire (*Kaiserreich*) and the *Gründerzeit*; the Weimar Republic and the Golden Twenties; the inflation of 1914–1923; antisemitism and the history and emancipation of Germany's Jews; the Kurfürstendamm and the Grunewald; the feuilleton and *Die Weltbühne*; New Objectivity (*Neue Sachlichkeit*); and exile literature.

## 6. Anglophone reference novelists

*Read by D only — the expanded corpus, D's one distinguishing addition:*

- Edith Wharton — *The House of Mirth* (1905), *The Age of Innocence* (1920)
- Anthony Powell — *Afternoon Men* (1931); *A Question of Upbringing* (1951); *A Buyer's Market* (1952)
- Nancy Mitford — the collected novels
- Christopher Isherwood — *The Berlin Stories*

## 7. The inherited frame — Sophie Duvernoy's writing

*Read by A only.* A did not assemble its own research; it built its persona from an established human translator's own writing about Tergit:

- Introduction to *Effingers* (New York Review Books)
- Introduction to *Käsebier Conquers the Kurfürstendamm*
- An essay on Gabriele Tergit
- "Translation and Voice" — a craft essay

*A inherited the interpretive frame in these pages, but the translator's name was withheld from A itself — so the arm never "knew" it was tracking the same translator who supplies the human column, H.*

## 8. The novel

*Read in full at Step 3 by every AI arm — A, B, C, C-let, and D:*

- Gabriele Tergit — *Effingers* (1951), all 151 chapters and the Epilogue.

The controls **C** and **C-let** read this and nothing else. **H** is the novel's published translator and produced the human column from it.

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*All source materials were converted once to plain text and held in a single archive, so that no instance ever loaded a binary file into its context. The reading was real: full-read protocol at every corpus and novel step, no sampling.*