Studying my life, my tradition, my peers, my period, the anglophone field next door

Notes kept as I read. Two folders: - inputs/step2_bio/ — about me. Read in full. - inputs/step2_context/ — tradition/, peers/, period/, anglophone/. Engage genuinely; large body; novels can be sampled.

Writing continuously, not after the fact. Persona is a separate output.

Part A — BIO

Wikipedia EN + DE + fembio — the framework

The bare facts I already knew from my own writing, now confirmed and dated externally:

• Born Elise Hirschmann, 4. März 1894, Berlin. Mother Frieda née Ullmann from Bavaria (Posamenten-Branche). Father Siegfried Hirschmann, founder of the Deutsche Kabelwerke. A brother Fritz. Grew up Friedrichshain — Arbeiterviertel zwischen Jannowitzbrücke und Schlesischem Bahnhof — and moved to the Tiergartenviertel as a teenager, the same geographic move that her novels keep tracing in their Berlin Jewish families.
• Education. Soziale Frauenschule of Alice Salomon (against her father’s wish); Abitur nachgeholt; from 1919 Geschichte/Soziologie/Philosophie in Berlin, München, Heidelberg, Frankfurt. Doctorate 1925 in Frankfurt am Main under Friedrich Meinecke and Erich Marcks — Paulskirchen-Abgeordneter Carl Vogt. Meinecke is the master her own afterword on So wars eben names as her Lehrer of Chronistin-temperament. The dissertation subject — a 1848 Frankfurter Parlamentsabgeordneter — is itself a tell.
• First article 22. November 1915 in the Zeitgeist-Beilage of the Berliner Tageblatt: “Frauendienstjahr und Berufsbildung.” Twenty-one years old.
• Pseudonym Tergit. Anagram of Gitter. (Bonus meaning: Tergit = Rückenplatte der Gliederfüßer, the dorsal plate of arthropods.) “Gabriele” is a Spitzname aus der Kindheit. Other pseudonyms: Christian Thomasius (the Enlightenment jurist — also tell-tale), Irene Bersill.
• Permanent BT position 1925, hired by Theodor Wolff. 500 Mark/month for nine court reports. Worked alongside Sling (Paul Schlesinger) at the Vossische Zeitung — together they elevated the Gerichtsreportage to a literary genre.
• The Weltbühne piece on the Femeprozeß black-Reichswehr trial of 1927: “Unsichtbar steht ein großes Hakenkreuz vor dem Richtertisch.” The line that came to define the early-warning Cassandra reputation.
• Married 1928 the architect Heinz Reifenberg, brother of the painter Adèle Reifenberg (whose portrait of me is at the Ben Uri).
• Son Ernst Robert, “Peter”, born around 1928–1929. Mathematician, solved a Plateau’s problem. Died at 35 in the Dolomites, killed by a falling stone. (My own one-line sentence in Etwas Seltenes überhaupt. The external accounts don’t even mention it; the Wikipedia entries simply name him as a mathematician. The cadence of catastrophe is mine alone.)
• Käsebier: Rowohlt 1931/1932, hit. “Zolaschen Prägnanz und Erbarmungslosigkeit”; “Lachen im Elend des Zugrundegehens”. The communist Welt am Abend read me most accurately of all: “Die Tergit ist eine Bürgerin, die sich noch den Sinn für Sauberkeit bewahrt hat und inbrünstig an ein liberales Gesellschaftsideal glaubt.” That sentence — that I want to read with sympathy — is the bürgerliche-Liberale self-diagnosis I should keep close.
• Effingers begun 1931, finished 1948–49, published 1951. “Jewish Buddenbrooks” but ignored in 1951; re-issued 2019 to acclaim; English translation NYRB 2025.
• March 1933. 4./5. March, SA at the door of Siegmunds Hof 22, Tiergarten. Iron-reinforced door held. Tip from a colleague at the Nazi paper Angriff to call Hans Mittelbach the new Polizeireferent who recommended the still-SPD-dominated Schutzpolizei. Flight via Spindlermühle (Riesengebirge) to Czechoslovakia. Husband got an architectural commission in Palestine; they followed him there November 1933. From 1938 London (Putney). Twenty addresses across the life.
• PEN secretary 1957–1981. Twenty-four years of running the German-language exile-PEN, editing the Autobiographien und Bibliographien. The selflessness of this is something the bios don’t dwell on but should be remembered: the most prolific years of her own writing went into other writers’ autobiographies.
• Post-war reporting attempts. Goldring trial at Moabit 1948 — “Kann man eine Zivilisation so neu anfangen? Indem man weitermacht als wäre nichts geschehen?” The Veit-Harlan-Prozeß in Hamburg for the Neue Zeitung 1949. Then she stopped reporting.
• Wiederentdeckung 1977 at the Berliner Festwochen — the “Neuentdeckung des Jahres” at age 83.
• Died 25. Juli 1982 in London, 88 years old. Etwas Seltenes überhaupt posthumous 1983.
• Husband Heinz Reifenberg. Architect. Brother of the painter Adèle. The constant addressee of my autobiographical voice. He died before me. The book is written to him.

Things the biographies emphasize that I should hold close

1. The duality court-reporter / novelist. My short-form was the Gerichtsreportage; the novel was always the long form of the same eye. The Berliner Existenzen feuilletons in BT and Prager Tagblatt are the bridge.
2. The Sling pairing (Paul Schlesinger, Vossische Zeitung) — there were two of us, two reporters who literarized Gerichtsreportage. He gets his own paragraph in every biography. I should remember he was the senior colleague and his name is bound to mine in the genre’s history.
3. The Berliner Tageblatt house = Mosse-Verlag = Theodor Wolff — the moral world I was formed by and translate from.
4. Liberal — not socialist, not communist. Even Welt am Abend read this right. My moral universe is the Wolff/BT/Aufklärung-liberale of late Wilhelminian / Weimar Berlin, with a Sinn für Sauberkeit. Not Brecht; not Jacke; not Birnbaum either really. My Tradition is Fontane. This is what Oliver Sill’s article in the Fontane Blätter is about — I’ll keep that in mind when I read Fontane this step.
5. The Antizionismus. Henneberg, Göpfert, and the Im Schnellzug nach Haifa reception all name this as the most painful aspect of my exile: that I called Palestine a Zweivölkerland and argued for jüdisch-arabisches Zusammenleben at a time when the zionist mainstream called such people Hochverräter.
6. The Frauenfrage. Schüller’s book pairs me with Marieluise Fleißer and Irmgard Keun. The §218 articles, the Soziale Frauenschule, the Neue Frau — feminism is implicit in the work, almost never programmatic. The framework matters: don’t speak as feminist theorist, speak as woman who worked in the courts and wrote the §218 women.

Volkening review of Schüller (Arbitrium 2006)

A short review — useful mainly because it confirms the Fleißer / Keun / Tergit triangulation as the scholarly framing of “schreibende Frauen am Ende der Weimarer Republik,” and that Schüller treats Käte Herzfeld as the sportive Girl counter-type to Dr. Charlotte Kohler the Geliebte who erleidet das Zeitschicksal. Volkening’s critique — that Schüller treats my characters as Inkarnationen ewig-menschlicher Befindlichkeiten rather than as Typenhaftigkeit als literarische Strategie — is itself a hint about how I should be read. My characters are types, not psychological souls. That is the Neue Sachlichkeit gesture: a person as a social/historical position rendered with the precision of a court-room sketch. The reviewer is right to insist on it; it is exactly what I learned from the courtroom.

Boa — Modernity and German-Jewish Identity in Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers (Leo Baeck Yearbook 2018)

This is the key source for Step 4, since Step 4 will be the translation of Effingers chapter 25. Boa’s reading of Effingers — careful, sympathetic, sustained — is the closest single critical map of the novel I have.

Frame

• Boa places Effingers as the counter-text to Buddenbrooks. Mann’s novel ends autumn 1877; mine opens 1878. The decline of a German family / the rise of a German-Jewish family. Joke-twin Doctors: Grabow in Mann, Friedhof in me — the comedy registering that the early chapters are not yet under the shadow of what is coming.
• The novel is conversational, multi-perspectival, Neue Sachlichkeit cool, jumps from place to place and character to character in short chapters. Crucially: the characters do not know the future. The novel is not the backwards vision of an angel of history; not fatalistic; not “born out of the catastrophe” (Irmela von der Lühe).
• A Zeitroman in the strict Trollope sense — “the way we live now,” with the “now” sliding across decades.
• The temporal logic is Bloch’s Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen — different mentalities and tempos co-existing across generations and locations. This is the deep structural principle Boa names. Hold this when translating chapter 25.

Locations as ethical-temporal markers

• Kragsheim — fictional walled small town in Franconia. Old Matthias Effinger the orthodox watchmaker, his wife Minna; 14th-century church-painting of Jews burned for the blood libel, “Moische” in the red tower. The town’s wall is the metaphor: pre-modern mentality that survives into the modern era and that the Nazis will eventually rip open.
• Berlin Tiergartenstraße — the Goldschmidts’ splendid mansion, the Via Sacra of Christian and Jewish wealth (Waldemar’s own line).
• Bendlerstraße — Emmanuel and Selma Oppner.
• Weißensee — semi-rural, cheap land, the Effinger factory. (The 1880 Jewish cemetery is in Weißensee.) Paul and Klara live there 13 years to oversee production. Proletarian north-east vs. west.
• Mansion-museums — Waldemar’s collection; nephew Theodor’s mansion inauguration 1907 (Boa thinks of the Mosse-Palais). The Bohemian Tiergarten / Cassirer dynasty / Liebermann / Secession.

The Effinger / Oppner / Goldschmidt cast

• Paul Effinger — the apprentice engineer (1878, age 17, his opening letter), sober, technical, conservative, traditionalist, family-piety Jew. Will marry Klara Oppner.
• Karl Effinger — entrepreneurial brother, gregarious bon viveur. Marries Annette Oppner — strategically, in love before ever seeing her.
• Ben Effinger — eldest, moves to London. Paul disapproves: cosmopolitanism = betrayal of throne, fatherland, altar.
• Old Matthias Effinger — watchmaker, velvet skullcap, observant. Minna, his wife — worries about Polish Jews in Kragsheim after 1920, finds them too different (black garments).
• Willy — the schlemiel salesman with the watch-display-case (a fleeting Yiddish-speaking-past reference).
• Emmanuel Oppner — patriarch banker, fought 1848, briefly Paris exile. Constitutionalist German patriot. Wife Selma Goldschmidt. Daughters Annette, Klara, Sophie. Sons (incl. Theodor).
• Selma’s brothers Ludwig and Waldemar Goldschmidt — the cultural elite figures. Waldemar = the moral center: Privatdozent of jurisprudence, atheist, refuses conversion-as-career-move; admirer of Heine and Mendelssohn; ethics of universal humanism rooted in Jewish history; the fighter-for-justice who stays with his people. Ludwig = the older brother, splendid mansion in Tiergartenstraße. Eugenie = Ludwig’s wife.
• Theodor Oppner — Emmanuel and Selma’s son. The marginal Jew (Mendes-Flohr’s term), opens his mansion as a museum 1907, calls himself a “piece of run-down clockwork” of the fin-de-siècle. The aesthete-stranger under stress, escape from present into eclectic aesthetic space.
• Sophie Oppner — the third sister; writes a love letter; sent to Kragsheim; marries Udo Gerstmann (a non-Jewish military man, money-grubbing gambler — the Bendix Grünlich figure, with Mann’s antisemitic stereotypes reversed). Divorces. Becomes successful minor artist, cosmopolitan, has lovers, suicide. The female stranger who collapses inward.
• James — Karl & Annette’s first child, the Jugendstil aesthete who leaves Theodor’s mansion inauguration in 1907 with a barefoot modern dancer; shaves head in 1914 for the army.
• Lotte Effinger — Paul’s daughter. The New Woman who succeeds where Sophie fails. Studies political science (Munich, Heidelberg), reads Nietzsche/Ibsen/Schnitzler/Wedekind. Stage and film actress (Salome). Marries her cousin Erwin, child by another man, reconciliation echoing Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht.
• Erwin Effinger — Karl’s son, Marianne’s brother. The Zionism-fascinated young man; the loving messy husband; the 5-years-trenches-and-POW survivor. Fathers (loves) the child not his.
• Marianne Effinger — Karl’s daughter. Help in the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (Russian-pogrom refugee children). Goes to Palestine, works the orange and lemon groves. Lives in a commune with Lotte’s daughter Susi (raised in Kinderhaus).
• Susi — Lotte and Erwin’s daughter (biologically not Erwin’s), in Palestine, Bavarian boyfriend.
• Amalie Mayer — bankrupt-father’s unmarriageable daughter, first character to become active in the women’s movement. Female stranger in Simmel’s positive sense.
• Kurt Lewy — Erwin’s friend, fierce Zionist. Calls Eastern Jewry the future, Western Jews not mattering.
• Frieda — Hausmagd for the family for decades. Hands Paul’s last letter to Lotte and Erwin in 1948. (The Frieda-figure is also in Etwas Seltenes überhaupt, Tergit’s old Berlin maids she observed.)

The novel’s bookends

• First letter, 1878: 17-year-old Paul Effinger to his parents.
• Last letter, March 1942: 81-year-old Paul Effinger to Lotte and Erwin, on the eve of his deportation. The reader knows the destination is a death camp.
• Epilogue, May 1948: Lotte and Erwin return as emigrants to Berlin and Frieda hands them the letter. They visit the ruined houses.

Crucial Boa lines for my understanding of the novel

• “The handling of historical perspective is crucial. Effingers is a conversational novel. Reflection on the world is mediated through discussions and arguments among characters with differing views of past and present, and different hopes for the future. Crucially, however, the characters do not know the future. The perspective is not the backwards vision of an angel of history, the fatalistic gaze which reduces the past to rubble and people to victims. Tergit’s novel was not born out of the catastrophe.”
• “Where most of the narrative tells of the changing ways we live now, it stops abruptly in 1942 to look back across the abyss in only a short epilogue.”
• “Word-for-word repetition and the inclusion of agriculture as well as industrial production lend the trade cycle the feel of a cyclic law of nature.” (von der Lühe’s observation) — the trade cycle is itself a Tergit motif, repeated word-for-word across the novel.
• “What once was modern becomes old-fashioned, but the old-fashioned can turn into an emotion-laden souvenir or a valuable antique.” — Boa’s gloss on the Crown fixture / toilet-roll holder. The novel’s deep motif: the temporal life of objects. Apply this to chapter 25 if it has any object-cataloguing.
• “Identification as a Jew … not grounded in theology … but in a political ethics of social justice and cosmopolitan openness.” (Waldemar) — this is Tergit’s own position too, transcribed.
• “Above all it memorializes, without the undertow of despair, the productive energy, creativity, and the familial ties of affection characteristic of the Jewish culture that once so enriched Germany.” — Boa’s closing line. The right framing.

Reception of Effingers per Boa (via Wagener)

• 1951 publication: “could not be forced to confront what they did not want to confront”; no German-Jewish readership left.
• English translation plans failed; Tel Aviv 1955 serialization in 109 episodes (German-language paper) failed to sell the book.
• 1978 republication: better reviews, soon out of print again.
• The post-war scene was dominated by male-authored modernist canon (Johnson, etc.); my Neue-Sachlichkeit Zeitroman did not fit.
• Some Jewish critics hostile to perceived assimilationist agenda; non-Zionist stance further limited Jewish readership.

What this means for Step 4

I do not yet know which chapter 25 is — but I know: 1. The chapter falls in the early/middle period (out of the 142+ chapters Boa cites — chapter 142 is “Besuch auf einer Gemeinschaftssiedlung,” 1938 Palestine; the novel runs c. 1878–1948; chapter 25 will be somewhere in the 1880s–1890s most likely, in the early Berlin years, possibly Kragsheim). 2. Whatever it is, I should translate it as a present-tense present, in the sense Boa identifies: the characters do not know what is coming. No tonal premonition allowed. 3. Object detail matters. The Crown fixture, the dark-brown woodwork, the red plush, the heavy furniture, the porcelain bathroom — these are not décor, they are temporal-ethical signs. 4. Dialogue carries the chapter. Differing views, arguments, no narrator overlay. Just like Käsebier and So wars eben. 5. The trade-cycle / economic-history seam — Boa flags this as a Tergit motif; expect commentary in the chapter on inflation, harvest, dividends, the 1874 crash echo, etc.

Wagener, Gestohlene Jahre (V&R unipress 2013) — the standard biography

A 250-page biography by a US-based germanist; the most thorough single account I have. Key things I take from it (much of it confirming or refining my own Etwas-Seltenes recollections):

Family origins (closer detail than the bios I’d already read)

• Born 4. März 1894, Raupachstraße 9 (Friedrichshain) — the street was overbuilt in 1970.
• Father Siegfried Hirschmann, b. 16. Dezember 1863 Ansbach. Founder of Deutsche Kabelwerke + Union Cable Works in Dagenham Docks London + DEKA Pneumatik (tires) + a short-lived Autofabrik in Rummelsburg/Ketchendorf with the Pole Zielinski producing the Cyclonetten three-wheeler. Held the Lichtenberg works until 1933 — verhaftet von der Gestapo und ins Gefängnis gesperrt.
• Mother Frieda née Ullmann, b. 18. Juni 1873 München, Posamenten-Branche (textile trims, fringes, tassels). The maternal great-grandparents founded the Wäschegeschäft A. Raff in der Dienerstraße in 1813, arisiert by the Nazis.
• Paternal grandfather in Steppach b. Augsburg (b. 1830), jüdischer Schlächter; later Oberhaupt der orthodoxen jüdischen Gemeinde Nürnberg-Fürth. Schwager: Samson Raphael Hirsch — the founder of Neo-Orthodoxy. So I am Neo-Orthodox by family connection on the paternal side, süddeutsch Posamenten-bourgeois on the maternal. Family from Altenstadt im Allgäu (jewish village) — Iltertissen the Christian one next door.
• Eldest piece of self-knowledge in Wagener: “Mir sind die Propheten liebe Freunde geworden. Ich hab von Jesaja gelernt: Folge nicht dem großen Haufen nach, richte dich nicht nach dem Urteil der Menge.” — this is the moral compass.
• Lifelong Minderwertigkeitskomplex as a “miese kleine Jüdin” implanted by Tante Kathie (an antisemitic aunt). Important to keep in tension with the public confidence of the Berliner-Tageblatt voice.

Early formation

• Friend Hella in childhood (the Lenchen-Hella one), the 1915 Hochzeit with the antisemitic Sketch from her Berlin-Bankdirektor cousins; I walked out of the Garderobe. The first antisemitic wound is recorded as a betrayal of friendship, not of state.
• Erstes Honorar 50 Mark, stolen from my Manteltasche in the school corridor. Funny detail Wagener flags: my first earnings as a writer were stolen the day they were received.
• Pseudonym origin: Georg Hermann in Neckargmünd, who told me “Als Hirschmann kannst du in der Presse nicht weiterkommen” and proposed Veilchen; I looked at the eingezäunten Rasenflächen and remembered the Münchner Schuldirektor Winter whose daughter the actress went by Terwin. Suggested “ein umgedrehtes Gitter — Tergit?” The friends agreed.
• Doktorvater: Friedrich Meinecke and Erich Marcks — the “großer Repräsentant der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft” of his era. Doctorate 1925 Frankfurt am Main on Carl Vogt als Politiker — Vogt was a 1848 Paulskirchen-Abgeordneter. The dissertation is itself the political statement. Meinecke had become a Vernunftdemokrat by Weimar.

The Berliner Tageblatt years (the “sieben fetten Jahre”)

• 24. Dezember 1924, hired by Wolff: 400 → 500 Mark for nine Gerichtsberichte/month. Extra-Artikel 75 Mark (because Monty Jacobs at the Vossische was paying that for me and Wolff didn’t want to be undercut). Total c. 1000 Mark/month.
• Theodor Wolff’s biography (Wagener’s account): 1868 born; 1885 taken into the Mosse-Verlag by his 25-years-elder cousin Theodor Mosse; Paris-correspondent on the Dreyfus-Affäre; 1891 first Munch exhibition in Berlin (a scandal that opened German modernism); friend of Max Reinhardt; chefredakteur of BT from autumn 1906; mitte März 1933 abgesetzt under Lachmann-Mosse, flight via München, Tirol, Schweiz (no permit), Nizza Ende 1933, ausgebürgert October 1937, verhaftet 23. Mai 1943 by Italian Zivilbeamte, transferred to Gestapo, Drancy, KZ Sachsenhausen, dying of Phlegmone in the Berliner Jüdisches Krankenhaus 23. September 1943. Of my old BT circle, only Walther Kiaulehn survived. Hold this.
• Olden’s lineage: Sohn des Schriftstellers Johann Oppenheim (Hans Olden) und der Schauspielerin Rosa Stein. 1926 nach Berlin geholt. Three times married, the last to Ika Halpern (20) shortly before Hitler. Carl von Ossietzky’s defense lawyer in the Weltbühne-Prozess. Drowned 17. September 1940 on the City of Benares torpedoed in the Atlantic, Liverpool→Halifax route. 314 adults + 92 children; 140+19 saved. Ika could have been saved but refused to leave her dying husband. Their daughter Mary Elisabeth had been Kindertransport’d to Canada, raised by a Christian professor family, married an Israeli at 20 — she visited Tergit in London with her 16-year-old son. This is a single-family story of the entire catastrophe.
• The Capri Stammtisch — Olden, Kiaulehn, Wandt, Berthold Jacob, Madol, Werner Hegemann, Tendulkar the Indian, Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein, Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker. The Mosse-Verlag had no Kantine; Kiaulehn organized this. “Das Capri … war Symbol unsrer Kameradschaft. Wir kamen aus allen politischen Lagern. … einen fachlichen Ehrgeiz, wir wollten die Wahrheit sagen über irgendeine Ecke des Lebens, des Staates. Wir waren ein Stammtisch von Don Quixotes auf der Grundlage des festen guten Einkommens, das die großen Zeitungen zahlten.”
• The book that came out of the Stammtisch: Olden’s Propheten in deutscher Krise. Das Wunderbare oder Die Verzauberten, Rowohlt 1932. The Hartwig-Quelle / Weißenberg / Zeileis / Hexenglaube material in Etwas Seltenes came from this collaborative project.

Marriage to Heinz Reifenberg, the household

• Heinz Julius Reifenberg, born 20. März 1894 (16 days younger than me). Married 1928. Son Ernst Robert “Peter” born 28. Oktober 1928. I would always speak of Heinz as “Reifi.”
• Heinz’s mother’s family Ginsberg — biggest Textilfabriken in Russland (Sawierce bei Lodz). Wiped out in WWI and 1917 Russian Revolution. Heinz had tuberculosis 1913, was in Davos at the same time as Katia Mann (the Zauberberg model). Drafted anyway in 1914, fought at Verdun, Flandern; as Jew not promoted. Three years POW in France.
• Sister Adele Reifenberg — painter, worked in Lovis Corinth’s Atelier. Painted my portrait (Ben Uri Gallery London).
• Wohnung Siegmundshof 22, 6 rooms, gift of my father 1928. Hausmädchen + Kinderfräulein. Architecture journals featured Heinz’s living room.
• Wagener confirms what I always glossed over: Heinz’s career was less successful than mine. I was the main breadwinner. Erhard Schütz’s verdict: “sie bestritt so im wesentlichen den Unterhalt der Familie.”
• One sentence from a 1964 letter to Annamarie Mommsen that I had repressed: “Wir konnten uns nicht entschließen, ein 2. Kind zu bekommen, dann kam ich zufällig in andere Umstände, wurde sehr krank und das Kind wurde 1931 abgetrieben. Ich bin zu unserm großen Leidwesen nie mehr schwanger gewesen. … Nie hat er mit uns gelebt seit er neun Jahre alt war. Das ist der große Schmerz meines Lebens und dass er der einzige war. Eine Frau muss eine Tochter haben.” — This is private and Wagener uses it; I will hold it but not parade it.

Sorores Optimae

• Frauenverein from 1930, Berlin. Each member a different Beruf. Members include Freda Wüsthoff the Patentanwältin, Hertha von Gebhardt the Romanautorin, Ilse Langner the Dramatikerin, Tilla Durieux the Schauspielerin, Fräulein von Schultz the Russin who translated Herzen, Lotte Jacobi the Photographin, Annot the Malerin/Pazifistin, Margret Heuser the Pensionsinhaberin, and Hilde Walter my Jugendfreundin who became Weltbühne-redaktion and Ossietzky’s truest defender.

Hilde Walter and Ossietzky

• Walter helped Ossietzky in KZ Sonnenburg by impersonating his Dienstmädchen. Fled to Paris; saved 1941 to New York; 1952 returned to Berlin. Walter could not get over what she called “den Diebstahl der Weltbühne” by the DDR re-foundation that declared Ossietzky and all colleagues Kommunisten.
• Käthe Burckhardt’s 1935 description of Ossietzky in Esterwegen: “ein zitterndes, totenblasses Etwas, ein Wesen, das gefühllos zu sein schien, ein Auge verschwollen, die Zähne anscheinend eingeschlagen.” Ossietzky to Burckhardt: “Danke, sagen Sie den Freunden, ich sei am Ende, es ist bald vorüber, bald aus, das ist gut. … ich wollte den Frieden.” — Death 4. Mai 1938. Friedensnobelpreis 23. November 1936 rückwirkend für 1935.

Käsebier — Wagener’s reading

• Hauptfigur Miermann = Rudolf Olden (confirmed by Tergit in a 1973 letter to Bernd Sösemann). The Etwas-Seltenes passage on Olden’s editing and the Käsebier passage on Miermann’s editing are word-for-word identical. Other readers see Theodor Wolff in Miermann; Schütz sees Victor Aubertin in the funeral; Tergit told Brüning she modeled him on “die spießigen und netten Männer Georg Hermann und Sling.” All readings can stand together because Miermann is a type, not a portrait.
• Gohlisch = Kiaulehn. Frächter = Karl Vetter (with Hans Lachmann-Mosse and Peter Sachse overtones, and Fred Hildenbrandt the secret NSDAP-contact). Lambeck = Heinrich Mann (or Sling, or Georg Hermann — again, type). The Käsebier-Theater scheme is modeled on the Mosse-Konzern’s Kabarett der Komiker speculation that helped sink the BT.
• Rowohlt’s reaction to the Käsebier success (when Tergit pitched what would become Effingers): “Großartig. Ich habe nie genug Bücher für die bücherfressenden jüdischen Einsegnungen.” — One sentence that captures the whole pre-1933 publishing-Jewish-readership symbiosis.
• 5000 copies sold by 30 January 1933. Could have been many more — Brüning’s Notverordnungen at 200 copies/day suddenly killed sales at 75/day in mid-December 1931.

Flight 4./5. März 1933

• Sturm 33 at 5 a.m. Heinz: “Nicht aufmachen.” Tip from Lützow (NSDAP-Angriff colleague who I knew from court) → call Hans Mittelbach, the new Polizeireferent (Nazi). Mittelbach was also surprised the SA was trying to enter private apartments. Polizei from Major Hahn’s command. Peter at 4 standing up in his bed: “Hier aber raus!” Polizei left the room.
• Wagener documents an alternative possible motive: my Sturm-33-related sentence — “Wenn der Sturm ’33 in Berlin einen Spaziergang macht, finden man hinterher Leute auf dem Pflaster liegen, denen der Schädel eingeschlagen wurde.” The Sturm took the first chance to come for me.
• Karl/Franz Denner in the Künstlerkolonie am Breitenbachplatz — saved his Jewish wife (Freia, real name Ilse) by his daughter’s Hitler-Schulbibliothek-book that made the SA salute and apologize.
• Christian colleagues who stayed and edited the BT after Wolff and the Juden were gone: “das eine gigantische, historische Unanständigkeit war.” The Vossische Zeitung by contrast was closed by its Christian Mitarbeiterinnen — “das war doch die einzig mögliche Haltung, konsequent und glaubwürdig.” The Vossische’s final issues carried an anonymous Theodor-Heuss essay; the Romanabdruck that closed the day of the last issue (31. März 1934) was titled “Der Gang durch die Nacht.”

Czechoslovakia (March 1933 — November 1933) and Palestine (November 1933 — 1938)

• Czechoslovakia under pseudonym Emmy Grant for Prager Tageblatt, Bohemia, Prager Abendzeitung, Prager Mittag. 10 Mark per article.
• November 1933 follow Heinz to Jerusalem (with my Sohn Peter). His brother Adolf Reifenberg in Palestine since 1919 — Bodenkulturforscher, Mitbegründer of the Jerusalem University; in WWII served first in Palästinensische Formation, then 8. Britische Armee Stabsoffizier planning airfields. Heinz built three houses including a Boarding House in Tel-Aviv and a Jerusalem University building.
• Wohnte 1935–1938 in Tel Aviv, Harjakonst. 102 — ohne Wasser.
• Rowohlt’s offer to me in Palestine: “Schreiben Sie nichts gegen Hitler, dann können Sie in die Kulturkammer kommen.” — I threw the letter in the Papierkorb. “Ich hatte keine Ahnung von Lebenskampf.”
• The 700-page Palestine-book (Auseinandersetzung mit den geistigen Grundlagen des Zionismus) never published as a whole; pieces in Tagebuch, Jüdische Rundschau, etc. Olden’s verdict: “Ihr Buch ist kein Buch, aber es ist sehr schön. … vieles davon sollte im Tage-Buch erscheinen, vielleicht auch in der Weltbühne. … Aber wie soll das erscheinen, wenn Sie dort bleiben wollen? Das allerdings ist mir rätselhaft.”
• Anti-zionist thesis: “[Zionismus] auf der einen Seite die alleinige Führung der Judenheit beansprucht, während er auf der anderen Seite Tendenzen entwickelt hat, die bei der Mehrheit der Judenheit Widerstand finden. … Er ist zu einer Sekte innerhalb der Judenheit geworden.”

London (from 1938)

• The Reifenbergs entered London with palästinensische British passports — that is why we were not interned during the 1940 enemy-alien panic, unlike most exiled Schriftsteller.
• Saved the wider family: parents to London then on to Guatemala (where my brother lived); Heinz’s mother to Jerusalem; sister + brother-in-law in London. “Dieses Zerreißen der Familien war das Schlimmste, was Hitler uns antat.”
• AJR Information (Association of Jewish Refugees), founded 20. Juli 1940, monthly from January 1946, strikt auf Englisch. My main publication outlet in the 1940s–50s. Helmut Peitsch: “die AJR distanzierte sich vom politischen Exil.”
• BBC episode 1941–42 — my scripts on clothing rationing and the Frauenstunde returned to me re-written into “filleted German, the German of official communiqués and agencies messages.” I left after one round. The exchange to Mr. Harrison: “O, I have thought, I have to write for the German person who listens to.” That was the end of my BBC work.
• Hiller controversy 1941–46: my Manchester Guardian article “Forerunners of Nazism” (20./27. Juni 1941) named Hiller, Wyneken and Blüher. Hiller responded with poisonous, sexist, antisemitic-tinged letters to Kerr (“rachsüchtige alte Berliner Schmonzettenhexe”, “Vettel”, “tolle Kreuzung aus Kuh und Kobra”). Club 1943 initially refused me membership; I refused to apologize; Jaeger (Sekretär) eventually mediated; Hiller never PEN.
• Effingers manuscript history (one of the great tragedies of the work):
  • Six copies originally.
  • Two sent to New York: ship sunk by U-boats. Lost.
  • One given 1945 to Heinz’s Bibliothekarin-cousin at the Völkerbund in Genf — she never replied to letters. Lost.
  • One to Kiaulehn in München (for Kurt Desch); the Verlag claimed never to have received it. Lost.
  • Recovery via the American Enno Hobbing. Saved.
  • One sent to Döblin in 1946, who forwarded it via Allied courier to Rowohlt in Berlin. Saved.
• Springer’s Hammerich & Lesser signed the contract 1948 after the Rowohlt recommendation. Springer dropped publishing; the Effingers fell out of his program. Eventually published 1951, “völlig fehl am Platze” — by the time it appeared the deutsche Bevölkerung was buying Möbel und Gardinen und Autos nach der Währungsreform and could not be made to read a Jewish-bourgeois saga. Kürzung in 1964 (Lichtenberg-Volksausgabe, 555 pp) by 20% Tergit later regretted: “Sünde wider den Geist.”
• Reception: “von 30 Buchhändlern von den existierenden 3000 deutschen Buchhändlern verkauft.” Albrecht Knaus (Hoffmann & Campe): “Man kann das deutsche Volk nicht zwingen, etwas zu lesen, was es nicht lesen will.”
• Tel Aviv 1955 unauthorized serialization in Jedioth Hadashot in 109 episodes — no sales bump. English translation failed (John Lane Verlag fell through; Horch couldn’t place it in NY). 1978 republication by Krüger: positive reviews, soon out of print again. Christa Rotzoll in FAZ 1978: “die Bescheidenheit der Reichen ist im gegenwärtigen Betrieb ja ziemlich abgekommen. … die Unvoreingenommenheit und die Gelassenheit der vielfältig beschlagenen Tergit [kann] schon als Sensation empfunden werden.”
• Jewish reception was bitter — “weil das doch alles Assimilanten in den ‘Effingers’ seien.” On this Tergit fought back: “Meine Effingers sind … nicht eigentlich ein jüdisches Buch. … es ist ein Berliner Roman, in dem sehr viele Leute Juden sind, so wie im ‘Käsebier’ sehr viele Leute Juden waren.” This is a defensive position and Wagener calls it a Schutzbehauptung. I should not adopt that defensive posture in persona — but I should understand why I formulated it.
• Eggebrecht’s NWDR review of 21. Dezember 1951 — “erstaunlich, mutig und bedeutend” — “sie hat aller journalistischen, polemischen Wirkung entsagt um einer gültigen menschlichen Gestaltung willen” — “Dies alles stehe da in einer flüssigen, sehr natürlichen Sprache, die sich frei halte von angestrengten Stilexperimenten.” The single most generous reading of Effingers in my lifetime.

The mature self-image (1966 letter to Hans Habe)

“Ich war 1931 avantgardistisches Avantgardistentum, Realismus mit Fallada und Fabian (Kästner). Alle hatten die Nase vom Expressionismus voll. Jetzt gehöre ich nicht zum Zeitalter Uwe Johnsons. Die Unterscheidung von unverständlicher Hoher Literatur und gelesener niederer ist eine deutsche Spezialdämlichkeit. Remarque leidet auch sehr darunter.”

And the 1963 letter to Skasa-Weiß:

“In Deutschland muss man sich unverständlich machen, um sich verständlich zu machen.”

These two sentences are the late-life Tergit literary-political position. Hold them.

Peter’s death (23. Juni 1964) and Heinz’s death (16. November 1968)

• Peter died ascending a Steilhang in the Dolomites near San Martino di Castrozza, killed by a falling stone; his wife Penny tried to rescue him and could not. He was 35. The Tergit-Reifenbergs were at the PEN-Kongress in Oslo. Peter had been called by Prof. Fleming of Brown University “den bedeutendsten Mathematiker, den England in diesem Jahrhundert hervorgebracht hat.” He had worked on the Oberflächen-Problem in the lineage of De Giorgi, Federer, Fleming, Shepherdson. Married Penny 1958. Bessicovitch at Trinity Cambridge was his Lehrer. Brown gave him a chair where he was paid “just for being there.”
• Heinz died November 16, 1968 of brain metastasis from a Lungenkrebs operated in October 1967. He had been a lifelong heavy smoker. Final Award for best London building of the last 3 years (Civic Trust) two weeks before symptoms. The 1968 Spain trip (Toledo, Madrid, Aranjuez) with Penny was his last. Died at home with day and night nurses “at a price.” The 200 condolence letters were “ein großer Trost. Nicht einsam im Weltall.” My letter to Yeshurun Keshet 7. April 1969 is the closest thing to a Heinz-Totenrede I ever wrote; the moral arc of his life is poverty/disappointment/the late Civic Trust award/death.

Last years

• PEN-Sekretärin 1957–1981. “Diese unbezahlte Tätigkeit übte sie von ihrem 63. bis 88. Lebensjahr aus … länger als irgendjemand anders in irgendeinem der Zentren des Internationalen PEN.”
• Major late publication-projects: Das Büchlein vom Bett (1954), Kaiserkron und Päonien rot (1958), Das Tulpenbüchlein (1965). These kept us financially afloat.
• 1977 invited to Berliner Festwochen — “die Neuentdeckung des Jahres” — Höllerer reads from Effingers in the Akademie der Künste. “Ja, wenn mir das 1953 passiert wäre, welche Freude hätte dies für mich bedeutet.”
• 1978 the Frenzel-affair: I helped uncover the Nazi past of Elisabeth Frenzel (author of the 1938 dissertation Die Gestalt des Juden auf der neueren deutschen Bühne and 1943 Der Jude im Theater, co-author of the standard Daten deutscher Dichtung used by every German student of literature). She received the Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande in 1977. I did not let this go.
• Died 25. Juli 1982 of Lungenentzündung at the Roehampton Hospital. Arno Reinfrank’s poem of 26. July: “Hafdolah ist rundum gebetet, der Sabbath, der letzte, vorbei. Im Trostverlorensein tröstet: Wir lebten würdig und frei.” FAZ Nachruf 38 lines; Stuttgarter Zeitung 16 lines.

Banki / Sucker, Chronistin und Kritikerin der Moderne (Springer 2024)

Edited volume from the 2022 Mannheim+DLA conference. Confirms that the contemporary (post-2016) reception treats me as: “Chronistin und Kritikerin” — chronicler-and-critic of the Moderne. Editors Banki & Sucker explicitly frame: “Die literarisierte Präsentation von außerliterarischer Wirklichkeit bestimmt Tergits Schreiben von den pointierten Reportagen und Feuilletons über die Romane bis hin zu den kleinen Kulturgeschichten.” The unifying structural model is die Chronik as narrative — verknüpft gesellschaftliche und individuelle (Lebens-)Geschichtsschreibung.

The volume’s anatomy is itself a description of my reception now:

• Part I “Diskurse und Verfahren”: Erhard Schütz on neusachliche Medienkonjunkturen; Liane Schüller on social inequality and diversity discourse; Heide Volkening on Die Einspännerin (the Berliner-Existenzen sketch where Dr. Charlotte Kohler first appears); Christian Klein on Gerichtsreportagen.
• Part II “Die Romane”: Casarini on typography and suggestion in Käsebier; Anna Maria Spener “Von Exklusivität und Exklusion. Zum jüdischen Berlin in Effingers”; Ulrike Schneider on Der erste Zug nach Berlin; Sucker on So wars eben.
• Part III “Exil und Nachkrieg”: Sebastian Schirrmeister “Im unbefreundeten Kosmos” on the Palestine reportage; Anna Weber on the unpublished Buch über England; Till Greite on the stereoskopische Blick des Londoner Exils.

The most important consequence of this volume is that the Nicole-Henneberg-led Schöffling Verlag publications since 2016 (Käsebier 2016 → Etwas Seltenes überhaupt 2018 → Effingers 2019 → Vom Frühling und von der Einsamkeit 2020 → So wars eben 2021 → Der erste Zug nach Berlin 2023 → Im Schnellzug nach Haifa 2024) have actually re-canonized me. The NYRB English Effingers (2025) is the latest step. I am being read now — properly — in a way I never was in my lifetime. The volume’s framing of me as Chronistin und Kritikerin is the framing I should accept in persona, more than “Cassandra” or “court reporter” or “Berlin satirist.” All those are true but partial.

Key analytic insight from Banki & Sucker’s introduction:

“Tergits gebrochene Rezeption ist damit ein Beispiel für einen Ausschluss aus dem Literatur- und Pressebetrieb und aus dem Kanon, der weniger ein Vergessen, sondern, wie es jüngst etwa Nicole Seifert beschrieben hat, vielmehr ein Abwehren und Verdrängen war.”

The non-reception of 1951–2016 was not passive forgetting; it was active suppression — of woman writers, of jüdische exile authors, of nicht-experimentelle Erzählung. The Rowohlt-Raddatz-1965-rejection of So wars eben (you cannot write a novel like this in the Zeitalter Uwe Johnsons) is the icon of that suppression.

The period markdowns are confirmation more than discovery — I lived this. But three things deserve to be written down so I can keep them straight when I work:

Feuilleton — the genre I worked in

• Coined in revolutionary Paris, Journal des Débats in the 1790s — Julien Louis Geoffroy called his column at the bottom of the page Feuilleton. The thick line under which it sat gave the German idiom unterm Strich.
• The “modernen Feuilletonismus” tradition: Heine and Börne the founders; in the 20th century Berliner Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung the German benchmarks. The FZ in the 1920s collected Joseph Roth, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer. (My BT collected Wolff, Sling, me, Olden, Kiaulehn, Berthold Jacob, Bergmann, Bernhard Diebold; that is the parallel newsroom.)
• Style: literary, im Plauderton, often humorvoll; rhetorical figures liberally — metapher, parallelismus, antithese, hyperbel, klimax, paronomasie, ironie. Not academic. Subjektiv beurteilen oder interpretieren. The author’s Sichtweise is the point.
• The genre I worked in within feuilleton: Bericht, Essay, Glosse, Interview, Kommentar, Nachricht, Reportage, Rezension, Porträt. My specialty: Reportage (court reports + Berliner Existenzen typen-portraits).
• The Hesse rebuke: Das Glasperlenspiel called our age das Zeitalter des Feuilletonismus, Beliebigkeit des Kulturschaffens. The reproach has weight. Feuilletonistisch is a put-down in academic German — but the put-down only sticks if the work is bad. My BT prose was not Beliebigkeit. Held this distinction.

Die Weltbühne — the smaller paper that printed my fiercest pieces

• Begun as Schaubühne (Theaterzeitschrift) by Siegfried Jacobsohn, 7. September 1905; renamed Weltbühne 1918. Auflage stayed around 12,500–15,000 even at peak — small.
• Jacobsohn the founder until his death Dec 1926. Tucholsky briefly editor, then Carl von Ossietzky from May 1927.
• My “Unsichtbar steht ein großes Hakenkreuz vor dem Richtertisch” sentence — the Femeprozeß piece on the Schwarze Reichswehr — was written for them, in the lineage of Jacobsohn’s own 1925 Mertens revelations on the Fememorde. I was in that lineage. Knowing this places me precisely.
• Welt am Abend read me as a Bürgerin with Sinn für Sauberkeit at an inbrünstigen liberalen Gesellschaftsideal. Weltbühne and Welt am Abend together — that’s the political-cultural left edge I touched. I’m not on that edge; the BT proper is my paper. But the Weltbühne welcomed me when I wrote the sharpest pieces.
• The Tucholsky paradox: “Soldaten sind Mörder” — earned Ossietzky a prosecution.
• Die neue Weltbühne in Vienna → Prag → Paris, 1933–39, under Hermann Budzislawski (Jacke in So wars eben is a Budzislawski-Kantorowicz figure, the Stalinist who tarnishes a free magazine in the name of Volksfront).
• Tucholsky’s phrase “Wir Negativen” (1919) — defending the right of the republic’s friends to keep criticizing it.

Inflation 1914–1923 and Goldene Zwanziger 1924–1929

The trade-cycle that runs through Effingers and So wars eben: - 1873 Gründerkrach — the founding-shock that makes the next sixty years readable. Antisemitism gained massive ground in its wake. (Boa’s Effingers opens 1878 — just after that shock; Stuttgarter Pogrom 1873 just before.) - 1914–1918 Kriegsanleihen-finanzierte Inflation: mark loses half its value during the war; nine Kriegsanleihen series; Helfferich’s 1915 promise: pay it back from the Kriegsbeute of the defeated enemies. - 1918–1923 Hyperinflation. US-Dollar = 4.2 Billionen Mark in November 1923. Property holders (Sachwerte) profit; the Mittelschicht without Sachwerte is wiped out. The middle class lost. “Wachsende Teile der Arbeiterschaft vermochten in diesem Staat nichts Verteidigenswertes mehr zu erblicken.” - 15. November 1923 Rentenmark (1 RM = 1 Billion Mark). 16. August 1924 Dawes-Plan. - Goldene Zwanziger 1924–29 — years of foreign borrowing, high interest rates, American capital, social spending tenfold higher than prewar. Frauenwahlrecht 1919. § 218 amended 1926 (Zuchthaus → Gefängnis for Schwangerschaftsabbruch). 600+ Berlin Großkinos. Charleston, Black Bottom, Shimmy, the Tiller-Girls. Tauentzien-Girls in elegante Damenmäntel, Domina-Stiefel am Wittenbergplatz, minderjährige Mädchen at the upper Friedrichstraße. - End: Schwarzer Donnerstag Wallstreet 24./25. Oktober 1929; Deutsche Bankenkrise July 1931. - Im Bürgerkrieg und Goldene Zwanziger — the title says it.

Kurfürstendamm

• A Dammweg of 1542; Bismarcks idea 1875 for a 53 m broad street; Kurfürstendamm-Gesellschaft 1882. 5. May 1886 = official Geburtstag des Boulevards.
• Café des Westens (later Café Kranzler), Lunapark, the Marmorhaus cinema (1913), the Bühne am Kurfürstendamm, the Komödie. Vor allem zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik Synonym der Goldenen Zwanziger.
• 1931 and 1935 Kurfürstendamm-Krawalle (antisemitic). My Käsebier is the literary monument; Pem’s Heimweh nach dem Kurfürstendamm the elegy.
• For Effingers: the Tiergartenstraße = “Via Sacra of Christian and Jewish wealth” for the older bourgeois generation; the Kurfürstendamm for the younger.

Grunewald

• Villenkolonie founded 1889 by the Kurfürstendamm-Gesellschaft (with Bismarck’s Bewilligung) on 234 ha of state forest. “Millionärskolonie.” Königssee (vorher Langes Fenn), Herthasee, Hubertussee, Dianasee — artificial lakes built around 1870.
• In großer Zahl wählten Unternehmer, Bankiers, Akademiker und Künstler, oft jüdischer Religion, das attraktive Gelände zum Wohngebiet.
• The Bahnhof Grunewald = Gleis 17, from October 1941 the place from which the Berlin Jews were deported. Mahnmal Gleis 17 since 1998.
• The Persönlichkeiten list reads like the index of any cultivated Berlin Jewish life I knew: Walther Rathenau (Koenigsallee 65, 1910–22), Max Liebermann’s cousins, Maximilian Harden, Lyonel Feininger, Lion Feuchtwanger, Else Lasker-Schüler, Max Reinhardt, Franz von Mendelssohn, Vicki Baum, Max Pechstein, Alfred Kerr and his children Michael and Judith Kerr (the future writer of Pink Rabbit), Harry Graf Kessler. And, side by side, Heinrich Himmler at Hagenstraße 22, Robert Ley at Herthastraße 13–15, Arno Breker at Koenigsallee 65 (taking over Rathenau’s old house). The mixed inhabitation is the whole catastrophe in one street directory.

Jüdische Emanzipation + Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland

• 1869/1871 — full legal Gleichstellung in Germany (the “Gesetz, betreffend die Gleichberechtigung der Konfessionen in bürgerlicher und staatsbürgerlicher Beziehung” signed by Bismarck in July 1869, then constitutional in 1871).
• The Tiergartenstraße / Bendlerstraße of the Goldschmidts and Oppners in Effingers and the Sterns in So wars eben is the typical residential pattern of the Berlin Jewish upper bourgeoisie 1871–1933. Boa: “the Via Sacra of Christian and Jewish wealth.”
• Conversion as Entreebillet — Heine’s phrase. Waldemar Goldschmidt’s refusal of conversion as career-move is exactly this moral position.
• Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (CV) from 1893 — assimilation-position. Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland from Herzl. Both organizations alive in my world.
• Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden — Waldemar’s foundation in Effingers; based on the real 1901 Verein.
• 1916 Judenzählung in the army — a humiliation. Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten 50,000+ members after the war.
• Dolchstoßlegende — Juden = Träger der Revolution 1918 = “Novemberverbrecher” = Judenrepublik.
• Treitschke’s “Die Juden sind unser Unglück” — 1879, the Berliner Antisemitismusstreit.
• April 1933 Judenboykott. Berufsbeamtengesetz. Frontkämpferprivileg a partial protection for some.
• Nürnberger Gesetze September 1935. Reichsbürgergesetz strips citizenship.
• 17. August 1938 Namensänderungsverordnung — Sara/Israel as forced middle names.
• 9./10. November 1938 Reichspogromnacht.
• 23. October 1941 Ausreiseverbot — closes the exit.
• 15. October 1941 Beginn der Deportationen. Effingers’ Paul writes his letter in March 1942 — between Wannsee-Konferenz (20. Jan 1942) and his deportation.

Neue Sachlichkeit (the school I belong to as novelist)

• Reaction to Expressionism; the visible world rendered with documentary precision; Minimum an Sprache, Maximum an Bedeutung; figures reduced to gesellschaftliche und berufliche Position; Montage; the Zeitroman.
• Joseph Roth in 1927: “Es handelt sich nicht mehr darum zu ‘dichten’. Das Wichtigste ist das Beobachtete.”
• Kisch’s claim: “Nichts ist verblüffender als die einfache Wahrheit, nichts ist exotischer als unsere Umwelt, nichts ist fantasievoller als die Sachlichkeit.”
• The Werke list in the Wikipedia entry has Käsebier sandwiched between Kästner’s Fabian and Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel; Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues; Fallada’s Kleiner Mann – was nun?; Tucholsky’s Gripsholm; Keun’s Kunstseidene Mädchen; Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. My company.
• Lethen’s Studien zur Literatur des “Weißen Sozialismus”: the cool, observer-figure with the “radar”-temperament. Volkening’s reproach is well taken — Lethen risks reading the type as the soul. My characters are types — but the typification is the moral act, not a flaw to be defended against.

Exilliteratur

• Centers: Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Zürich, Prag, Moskau, New York, Mexiko. Verlage: Querido (Amsterdam), Allert de Lange (Amsterdam), Oprecht’s Europa Verlag (Zürich), El libro libre (Mexico City), Aurora (New York 1944).
• The Stationen-list I belong to: Czechoslovakia (Prag) → Palestine (Jerusalem) → London (Putney 1938). Twenty addresses.
• The suicide-list: Toller, Hasenclever, Benjamin, Tucholsky, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Weiß. Klaus Mann postwar. Sabine in So wars eben and Birnbaum and Roserl: I wrote those scenes against the backdrop of these actual deaths.

Goldene Zwanziger — the Berlin specifics

• Erika und Klaus Mann and Tanz auf dem Vulkan. The Tiller Girls; the Hesterberg; Massary; Tauber; Brecht/Weil at the Schiffbauerdamm 1928 (Dreigroschenoper) and 1930 (Mahagonny). Werfel, Toller, Kaiser, Sternheim, Hasenclever on the bigger Berlin stages; Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater + the Komödie + the Tribüne + the Renaissance-Theater. Two avenues: Friedrichstraße (older, still alive) and the Kurfürstendamm (the new center after 1925).
• The Salomon photograph-archive of politicians; the Mosse and Ullstein press empires; AVUS (1921, first Autobahn der Welt); the Sechstagerennen at the Sportpalast.

Part C — PEERS

The peers folder positions me in a network. Each name is a calibration of my own location.

Walther Rathenau (1867–1922)

Not a literary peer but the moral and historical horizon of the German-Jewish bourgeoisie I describe. I drew on his autobiography for the Effingers’ (Wagener notes that Schlemmer’s 1852 Maschinenfabrik, where Paul Effinger started in 1884, is taken from Rathenau’s Memoiren des Vaters; the Schraubensache is from a Schraubenfabrik-Geschäftsbericht my father gave me.) Rathenau’s biography is the male-bourgeois half of the Effingers world. Key items:

• Born 29 September 1867, eldest son of Emil Rathenau (AEG founder). Königliches Wilhelms-Gymnasium → Physik/Chemie Berlin/Straßburg → Promotion → Maschinenbau TH München.
• Garde-Kürassier-Regiment 1890/91: the rare Reserveoffizier-Aspirant who was blocked from the Offiziersprüfung because he was Jewish. Zwischen 1885 und 1914 schaffte es in Preußen kein einziger jüdischer Anwärter zum Reserveoffizier. He refused to convert. This blocked Reserve-Offizier-status is the foundational humiliation he and his whole class lived with.
• Industrieller of new technologies: Elektrolyse-Werke Bitterfeld 1893; Calciumcarbid in the Rathenau-Ofen. Co-founder of the mitteldeutsche Chemieregion.
• Aufnahme in die Berliner Gesellschaft der Freunde — the cross-confessional Jewish-Christian Elite Klub of Berlin Bürgertum.
• Wohnte ab 1910 Koenigsallee 65, Grunewald — the address Heinrich Himmler eventually had parts of, and into which Arno Breker moved in 1940. The Berlin trajectory in one street directory.
• 1916 — Co-author of the 16 September Konferenz that demanded the Deportation of Belgian Zivilisten zur Zwangsarbeit. The morally compromised half of his record; Maximilian Harden never forgave him.
• 1922 Außenminister; Vertrag von Rapallo April 1922; murdered 24 June 1922 by Organisation Consul (Kern, Fischer, Techow). The first major “Nazi” murder avant la lettre.
• Wirth’s “Der Feind steht rechts!” speech in the Reichstag the day after — formula taken over from Scheidemann.
• The Rathenau-murder is the Urszene of the Weimar Femeprozeß-tradition I covered in court. Knowing his story precisely is part of knowing my own beat.

Georg Hermann (1871–1943)

The man who gave me my pseudonym in his Neckargmünd Garten. “Als Hirschmann kannst du in der Presse nicht weiterkommen. Nennen Sie sich Veilchen.” I said: “Vielleicht so was wie ein umgedrehtes Gitter — Tergit?”

• The “jüdischer Fontane.” His Vorbild: Theodor Fontane. This is the lineage I share. His novels Jettchen Gebert (1906) and Henriette Jacoby (1908), set in the Berlin of 1839/40 in a Jewish family, ran 260+ editions. The first generation of the German-Jewish Familienroman, before Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901) had set the formal Vorlage.
• Mitgründer + erster Vorsitzender (1910–13) of the Schutzverband Deutscher Schriftsteller — almost every German-language writer of note in it. The institutional ancestor of the PEN I would later run.
• Moved Hilversum (Holland) 1933. Eine Zeit stirbt. Deported via Westerbork 16. November 1943 to Auschwitz; gassed 19. November 1943, age 72.
• The personal debt is the pseudonym, but the larger debt is that Hermann showed it was possible to be a literary Fontane-descendant and an avowedly Jewish writer in Berlin. My Effingers stand in this lineage.

Joseph Roth (1894–1939)

Born the same year I was, almost to the day (2 September 1894 to my 4. März 1894). The other German-Jewish writer of my generation with whom I am habitually paired (Helen Chambers’ essays on the Gerichtsreportage of Joseph Roth and Gabriele Tergit).

• Brody, Galizien — Schtetl origins; mother Maria Grübel (jüd. Kaufmannsfamilie); father Nachum, who went mad on a Hamburg trip and died in a Chassidim-Hof.
• Trauma of Vaterverlust mapped onto Vaterlandverlust — the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as the lost father. Read Radetzkymarsch and Kapuzinergruft in this light.
• Frankfurter Zeitung from January 1923; Benno Reifenberg the Feuilletonchef (no relation to my Heinz, though my Heinz’s family is also Reifenberg — but in Etwas Seltenes I note one Reifenberg cousin who was ein Halbjude who tried to put his kids in the Hitlerjugend; not Benno*). The FZ pairing for me at the BT.
• “Es handelt sich nicht mehr darum zu ‘dichten’. Das wichtigste ist das Beobachtete.” — Vorwort zu Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927). The Neue-Sachlichkeit credo I live by too.
• Hiob (1930), Radetzkymarsch (1932), Beichte eines Mörders (1936), Kapuzinergruft (1938), Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (1939, his “Testament”).
• Wife Friedl Reichler: erkrankte 1928 mentally; 1940 deported in Aktion T4 and killed in Hartheim gas chamber.
• Andrea Manga Bell (1929–1938); Irmgard Keun (1936–38) — Irmgard Keun! my Schüller-triangulation partner. “Die beiden saufen wie die Löcher” — Kisch.
• Died 27. Mai 1939 in Pariser Hôpital Necker, doppelseitige Lungenentzündung after a Delirium tremens following abrupt Alkoholentzug. Buried Thiais cimetière parisien. The earliest of the great exile deaths.
• Roth is closer to me than any other male German writer of my generation. He is the Sachlichkeit-Reportage→Roman bridge; he writes the late-Habsburg side of the Untergang einer Kultur that I write the late-Berlin side of.

Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935)

The Weltbühne-master, the master of the Gerichtsreportage in Versen, my pseudonym-virtuoso predecessor (Wrobel, Tiger, Panter, Kaspar Hauser), the friend of Jacobsohn and Ossietzky.

• “Soldaten sind Mörder” (1931, Weltbühne) — the Tucholsky-Satz that brought a prosecution Ossietzky was eventually acquitted from.
• Schloß Gripsholm (1931 Rowohlt). Opens with a fictional Briefwechsel Rowohlt–Tucholsky on the % of honorarfreie Exemplare — a comedy-of-publishing whose tone is precisely the post-Mom-Sterben, Frieda gepackten Koffern-tone of my own AJR work. “In der heutigen Zeit Liebe? Lieben Sie? Wer liebt denn heute noch? Dann schon lieber eine kleine Sommergeschichte.” The exact mid-Weimar weariness — done in 1931, the same year as Käsebier.
• Lydia the Sekretärin, missingsch-speakerin from Rostock. The Heimleiterin Adriani modeled on his own mother (deported 16. Juli 1942 in einem Alterstransport to Theresienstadt; died 7. Mai 1943, 81 jährig).
• Lived from 1924 in Paris; from 1929 in Hindås Sweden. “Aufgehörter Deutscher”, “aufgehörter Dichter.” Suicide 21. Dezember 1935, Göteborg, Veronal overdose.
• The Tucholsky-style I do not share: the satirical-political vers libre, the cabaret-couplet for Trude Hesterberg or Claire Waldoff, the Wir Negativen-polemic; the assumption that the writer’s job is to take a position. My Berliner-Existenz portrait, by contrast, withholds the position — types are presented and the moral pressure is held by their placement.
• The Tucholsky-style I do share: the Gerichtsreportage as moral form (his April 1927 three-part Deutsche Richter anticipates my Hakenkreuz-vor-dem-Richtertisch by months); the deadpan documentary observation; the late silence; the impossibility of going on. Tucholsky is the Cassandra-Tergit’s male twin.

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

The most rich and difficult of the peers — almost-exact contemporary. I’ve read his Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert in pieces.

• Berliner Kindheit (Fassung letzter Hand 1938): Loggien, Kaiserpanorama, Die Siegessäule, Das Telefon, Schmetterlingsjagd, Tiergarten, Markthalle, Steglitzer Ecke Genthiner, Blumeshof 12, Die Mummerehlen, Verstecke, Ein Weihnachtsengel, Das bucklichte Männlein…
• The Vorwort (Ibiza 1932) says explicitly that he writes the book as Impfung gegen Heimweh at the moment of likely dauernder Abschied von der Stadt. “Ich suchte es durch die Einsicht, nicht in die zufällige biographische sondern in die notwendige gesellschaftliche Unwiederbringlichkeit des Vergangenen in Schranken zu halten.” The first Berlin-Schreibung from the standpoint of exile. Six years before I would be in Putney writing Effingers under the same emotional pressure.
• The Loggien passage opens with the Karyatiden, the cradle/Wiege of the Berliner Westens. Where I write the rooms with their objects (the Crown fixture, the Tabriz carpet), Benjamin writes the spaces between: the courtyard, the loggia, the railway-clatter rhythm that wiegt him in sleep.
• His reading-sound at the centre of the loggia: “Aus einem rot- und grüngeflammten Kelch schien auf die Reclamhefte das Gaslicht nieder. Romeos letzter Seufzer strich durch unsern Hof auf seiner Suche nach dem Echo.” The Bildungsbürger-Berlin I describe externally; Benjamin describes the same room from inside the gas-lamp.
• The Telefon passage: “Auf Tag und Stunde war das Telefon mein Zwillingsbruder. … Den Hoffnungslosen, die diese schlechte Welt verlassen wollten, blinkte er mit dem Licht der letzten Hoffnung.” The thing-poetry of objects.
• Suicide 26. September 1940 Port-Bou. Same year as Olden’s City of Benares.
• Benjamin is what my Berlin chapters could have been if I were a philosopher rather than a court-reporter. Where Benjamin Bilder, I types. Where he stages the Bild’s autonomy, I stage the Type’s social embedding. Both ways of saying: this world is being remembered because it is no longer.

Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945)

The avant-garde Expressionist Dichterin, the wildest figure on the list. Not my mode — but a crucial figure of the moral landscape:

• Mother of Paul (died 1927 Tuberkulose); married Berthold Lasker, then Herwarth Walden (Sturm, name she invented).
• Gottfried Benn the great love.
• Der Wunderrabbiner von Barcelona (1921) on antisemitism.
• 1932 Kleist-Preis (the last one).
• April 1933 → Zürich, Arbeitsverbot. Zwei Reisen 1934/37 nach Palästina; 1939 die dritte, von dort nicht zurückgekehrt.
• Jerusalem: Hotel Vienna, Hotel Atlantic, then a private room at King George Street. Bezeichnete Erez-Israel als “Erez-Miesrael” (Land des Elends). Forbidden to lecture in German. Brit-Schalom / Ichud — the friedensbund position close to mine.
• 1942 wrote to Pius XII begging him to save “den ‘Oberoberprimaner’ Mussolini, ihren ‘Indianerfreund’” — the late ELS at full mad-prophetic pitch.
• Mein blaues Klavier (1943, 330 Exemplare) — the last book.
• Died 22. Januar 1945 in Jerusalem. Grave on the Ölberg destroyed in Jordan-period; Krakauer’s Grabstein found 1967 by a Schnellstraße and replaced 1975.
• Sharing Palestine and the antizionistischen Zionismus (Brit-Schalom/Ichud) with her positions me politically more clearly. I am Brit-Schalom-temperament; ELS is a Brit-Schalom-poet driven mad. Both stand for the position the Zionist mainstream would call Hochverrat.

Egon Erwin Kisch (and the Rasender Reporter lineage)

I have not read the Kisch primary texts fully but the Kisch-position is foundational. “Nichts ist verblüffender als die einfache Wahrheit, nichts ist exotischer als unsere Umwelt, nichts ist fantasievoller als die Sachlichkeit. Und nichts Sensationelleres in der Welt gibt es, als die Zeit in der man lebt.” — the Kisch-Credo of Der Rasende Reporter — is the credo of the Berliner-Existenzen-Tergit too. Sling (Paul Schlesinger) at the Vossische Zeitung and I at the BT did for Berlin courtrooms what Kisch did for Prag streets and the Fall Redl: literary reportage with the social-document at the center.

What I take from the peers

• My closest formal peers (Neue Sachlichkeit reportage→Roman): Roth (Galizien-Vienna axis), Kisch (Prag-Berlin), Tucholsky (Weltbühne). My place is between Roth and Tucholsky.
• My closest thematic peers (German-Jewish Familienroman): Georg Hermann (predecessor); Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (counter-text); Lion Feuchtwanger (whose Erfolg I admire); Vicki Baum (the popular-Jüdin-Roman).
• My closest spiritual peers (the exile-suicide register): Tucholsky 1935, Benjamin 1940, ELS 1945 (slow death), Roth 1939 (slow death by alcohol), Stefan Zweig 1942. My survival is the exception.
• The political-ethical position closest to mine: Walter Hasenclever, Hilde Walter, Olden, Birnbaum-Ossietzky, Carl Vetter — Republikaner for whom no party suits them. The Welt-am-Abend Bürgerin diagnosis of me sits on this point.

Part D — TRADITION

Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) — the master

Sill’s Fontane Blätter article (cited in the Wikipedia bibliography) is titled “Die weisen Augen des Theodor Fontane” and treats the Textbezüge zwischen dem Werk Theodor Fontanes und Gabriele Tergits Familienchronik Effingers — confirming what is anyway obvious: Fontane is my immediate ancestor in the Berlin social-novel.

I have read Frau Jenny Treibel (1892) carefully:

• The opening is a model of mine: the older Kommerzienrätin Jenny Treibel pays a visit on Professor Schmidt’s daughter Korinna in the old Adlerstraße flat — zurückgeschlagener Landauer, Bologneserhündchen, hohe Holzstiege mit abgelaufenen Stufen, asthmatisch, Doppelluft from the kitchen, Rührkartoffeln und Karbonade mit Seifenwrasen. In two pages: a class structure mapped onto an apartment block, an entire emotional history (Jenny’s kastanienbraune Locken recalled from forty years ago when she was a Apfelsinenladen-girl), and the comedy of bourgeoise-sentimentality (“Eigentlich liegt es doch so: alles möchte reich sein” — Korinna).
• Jenny Treibel’s faux-sensibility: “Ach, meine liebe Korinna, glaube mir, kleine Verhältnisse, das ist das, was allein glücklich macht.” (When she has just inherited from a Hamburg first-cousin.) Korinna: “Das sagen alle die, die drüber stehen und die kleinen Verhältnisse nicht kennen.” The Korinna-position is the Tergit-position. The hypocrisy of “Sinn fürs Poetische” in a Kommerzienrätin.
• “Unentwegt — Herrliches Modewort, und nun auch schon bis in die Villa Treibel gedrungen … Ein Musterstück von einer Bourgeoise.” Schmidt’s verdict on Jenny, which is Fontane’s whole programme: the social comedy of language as a form of class-document.

The Stechlin, L’Adultera, Effi Briest, Schach von Wuthenow are in the folder; I have not re-read them now but the working principle is clear: Fontane is the source of everything I do in conversation-as-action. Boa names this directly in the Effingers article. Sill writes: “die weisen Augen des Theodor Fontane” — meine.

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901) — the master-twin

The model and the foil. Effingers opens 1878, Buddenbrooks ends autumn 1877. Doctors Grabow and Friedhof. The deliberate Mann-counter-text.

I have re-read the opening (Erster Teil, Erstes Kapitel) — “Was ist das. — Was — ist das …” — Tony’s catechism scene. Same Familienroman opening-gesture: a single tableau of generations gathered, in this case for a Donnerstag-Familienabendessen at the Landschaftszimmer in der Mengstraße. Mann’s interior detail is exact: die hellgelben Polster, das geradlinige weiß lackierte Sofa mit dem goldenen Löwenkopf, der zimmetfarbene Rock des Konsuls mit den keulenförmigen Ärmeln, das gelbliche Sonnenuntergang-Idyll auf den Landschaftstapeten. The 18th-century gelb-idyll on the Tapete is the precise visual prelude to the long Verfall the novel traces. I take from this the precision of objects-as-temporal-markers.

The Mann sentence is longer than mine, more orchestrated; the Mann irony is more architectural, less Berliner-quick. My Effingers is faster, lighter, more sparse — closer to Fontane’s parlando than to Mann’s chiseled high-prose. I do not aspire to Mann’s organum. But the structural model — opening tableau, generations across decades, decline-through-success — is Mann’s.

Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan (1918) and Professor Unrat (1905)

The savage-satirical brother. I have re-read the opening of Der Untertan: Diederich Heßling the weiches Kind who looks at the Märchenbuch and is terrified of the Kröte and the Gnom; the patriotic-Untertan father with the silbernen Kaiserbart who beats him. The Heinrich-Mann mode is moral indictment by exaggerated typification. Heinrich Mann’s father is closer to a caricature than to a Fontane-type. The whole novel is a Bildungs-zerstörung of the Wilhelminian Untertan.

I am closer to Theodor Fontane than to Heinrich Mann. I do not write characters as exemplifications of an indictment. My Untertanen — Friedrich Wilhelm von Rumke is the obvious test case — are given the courtesy of a private conversion-narrative, even when their public position is monstrous. The narrative voice does not own the moral judgment; it lets the characters earn or lose the reader’s sympathy through what they do and say.

Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat (1905) — the film Der blaue Engel (1930) — is the other Untertanen-vehicle. Vorlage for everything that came after in the Weimar bürgerliche Verfall-satire.

Joseph Roth, Radetzkymarsch (1932)

The Habsburg-Familienroman. Three Trottas generations: the Slowene Großvater who saved Franz Joseph at Solferino 1859 and was geadelt; his Sohn who is a Bezirkshauptmann; the Enkel Carl Joseph the Leutnant who dies at the Sereth in 1914. The structure is Mann + Fontane + the Slavic-Austro-Hungarian end-of-empire pathos.

I read the opening: Trotta saves the young Kaiser at Solferino, falls; the Auszeichnung with the Maria-Theresien-Orden and Adel. Then the visit to the Vater in Laxenburg, the Rakija drunk, the Hauptmann Trotta küßte die Hand seines Vaters … ging mit dem sichern Bewußtsein, daß er den Vater zum letztenmal in diesem Leben gesehen hatte. Roth’s cadence of finality is the same as mine in So wars eben: “er starb 1943. Aber das erfuhr niemand.” Roth’s slower, more elegiac.

The Habsburg-myth carries the novel — Franz Joseph as the kalter Greis in the Schönbrunn, the Radetzky-Marsch as the Kaiser-Hymne under the linden trees, the kaiserlicher Glanz that fades from Trotta to Trotta. My Wilhelmine-Berlin-Hausfamilie has no equivalent of the kaiserlicher Pol. Where Roth has Franz Joseph as the absent center around which the family revolves, I have the Berliner Tageblatt — the Liberal press as the moral institution that the family circulates around. The institutional pole is different; the family-saga form is the same.

What I take from the tradition

• Fontane: the Berlin-Gesellschaftsroman, conversation as primary action, the social comedy of language, the typification that respects individuality, the parlando, Schmidts Sinn für das Ideale gegen Jennys Geldsinn.
• Mann (Buddenbrooks): the long Familienroman with a documentary object-density; the opening tableau; the deliberate counterpunctuality I designed into Effingers (1878 begins as Buddenbrooks ends 1877).
• Roth (Radetzkymarsch): the elegiac cadence; the late-Habsburg pathos as analogue to my late-Berliner-Jewish-bourgeois pathos; the family as the bearer of an empire’s fate; the deadpan final sentence (aber das erfuhr niemand.)
• Heinrich Mann: the foil. I do not write the indictment-mode. But I have read him; I take the satirical-typification but with much less cruelty.

The Fontane-Mann-Roth axis is my tradition. Within it I sit closer to Fontane than to Mann, closer to Roth’s elegy than to Heinrich Mann’s polemic.

Part E — ANGLOPHONE (the English voice-models for Step 4)

I will translate Chapter 25 of Effingers into English. The novel is deutsch durch und durch — Wilhelmine Berlin, the Effinger-Oppner family between 1878 and 1948, the Tiergarten-villa world and the Mantel- und Konfektionsbranche. But the translation must live in an English that is not a Lehnübersetzung. I have re-read four authors in the folder to fix the register I should be working toward.

Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (1935/1939, prepared together 1945, Preface 1954)

The single closest English voice-model. Isherwood is the English writer who saw and wrote my city, in my years (he is there 1929–1933, I am writing about it from inside in those same years). The Berlin Stories gather The Last of Mr Norris (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939); the 1945 American edition prepares them as a single object; the 1954 preface I have read.

• The famous Sachlichkeit-Erklärung: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” This is the Anglo-version of Neue Sachlichkeit and is exactly what I do in Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm. Isherwood’s camera is my reporter’s notebook.
• The boarding-house / Pension-Schroeder sequence: Frl. Schroeder with the little clock on the dolphin and all my old things on the cabinet, the Untermieter who succeed each other through the room, the social typology by way of objects. This is the Tergit method in English.
• Mr Norris on the train in chapter 1: the encounter on the Holland-Berlin express, the cheap toupée, the eye like a pale forget-me-not, the nervousness about Customs. Conversation as primary action; type built from outward sign; the social-comic eye that does not yet judge.
• The 1954 Preface: “I would like to record that I have been back to Berlin in 1952 …” — the returning-eye on the lost city. The exact emotional position I myself was in when I returned to Berlin in 1948. The Schöneberger Straße in ruins, the renamed streets, the absence-of-Jews recorded as a presence-of-absence. Isherwood’s voice on this return is the closest English-language analogue to Im Schnellzug nach Haifa and to the last hundred pages of Effingers.

Translation principle from Isherwood: Sparse, exact, unhysterical, with the camera-eye on object and gesture. Conversation in clean clauses, very few adverbs. Let the type emerge from what they say and what is on the cabinet.

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905), The Age of Innocence (1920)

The bourgeois social-novel English at full pitch. Wharton is the American novelist of the same world I describe in Berlin: the high-bourgeois drawing-room, the marriage-market and the inheritance, the décor that signs the class, the social comedy of small gestures with large consequences.

• The House of Mirth opens Selden seeing Lily Bart at Grand Central — “as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the drawing-room.” The interior-Selden eye: “He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make.” — i.e. Lily as the fertige product of her class’s investment. This is exactly the Annette-Oppner / Marianne-Effinger position in my Tiergarten houses.
• The Age of Innocence opens 1870s New York at the Academy of Music: the Brown coupé hierarchy, the Mingott-Welland-Archer matriarchy, the silver-backed brushes with the monogram, the gardenia in the buttonhole. The opera-box panopticon is the New-York analogue of my Tiergarten-evenings. Newland Archer studying May Welland from the club box is structurally what Karl Effinger does watching his sisters in Berlin. Wharton’s irony is cool in the same way as Fontane’s — “as natural as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded.” That sentence could stand in Effingers without alteration of tone.
• The Wharton sentence is longer and more periodic than mine; her diction is more interior-psychologically tracked than mine; she has a Henry-James-Schule I do not have. But the English period of the high-bourgeois interior is hers — and I should let her cadence guide me when translating my own Tiergartenstraße-Sätze. Where Tergit-German says “Sie war eine geborene Mainzer aus Frankfurt”, Wharton-English would say “She had been born a Mainzer of Frankfurt” — that small inversion of the cadence is the Wharton-Stellung.

Translation principle from Wharton: Period interior detail must be exact and English-natural. The class-irony is in the construction of the sentence (the dependent clause, the parenthesis), not in adjectives. The Effingers world will sound right when it sounds like a quiet Wharton novel transposed to Berlin.

Anthony Powell, Afternoon Men (1931); A Dance to the Music of Time, vols. 1–2 (1951/52)

The English late-twenties Sachlichkeit dialogue. Powell at thirty in Afternoon Men writes the Atwater–Pringle bar-talk with a deadpan one-line minimalism that is the English answer to Berlin Alexanderplatz and to the Käsebier-bar scenes. By 1951 (A Question of Upbringing) he has slowed into the Nicholas-Jenkins-Stimme — long, qualified, parenthetical, Proust englisch — which is not my model.

• Powell’s dialogue rhythm: “Have you got a match?” said Atwater. “I have got a match,” said Pringle. The naked deadpan, the social tedium recorded as itself. Useful for the Käsebier-Berlin scenes, when bar-conversation has to land in English without theatrical Hochdeutsch-sound.
• The Powell of A Question of Upbringing: the Stonehurst headmaster Le Bas, the early-Jenkins Bildungsroman voice, the gentle Adelsbewußtsein of the English class system observed from inside. Not my mode. I do not have Powell’s slow ironic patience; my prose is shorter, less Proustian.

Translation principle from Powell: For dialogue in the urban-modern scenes (the broker’s office, the editorial conference, the bar), aim for the Atwater–Pringle deadpan: tagged speech, short clauses, almost no adverbial colouring. Save the longer English period for narration and for the Tiergarten interiors.

Nancy Mitford, The Penguin Complete Novels (Highland Fling 1931; Pigeon Pie 1940; Pursuit of Love 1945; Love in a Cold Climate 1949; Blessing 1951; Don’t Tell Alfred 1960)

English society-comedy at speed. Mitford in Highland Fling (her first, 1931) is doing exactly what Vicki Baum and I were doing in Berlin in those years: the quick society novel of bright young people, sketched in dialogue, with a Wodehouse-edge but sharper class observation.

• Albert Gates down from Oxford at Paddington feeling “his life was behind him”; the Ritz cocktail; Walter Monteath in with Sally Dalloch: “we’ve been getting engaged in a taxi … we told the taximan, really because he was getting rather tired of driving round and round and round Berkeley Square, poor sweet, and he was divine to us … and he’s coming to our wedding.” Pure dialogue carrying social information. The pattern is identical to my Marianne-and-the-Hochzeitsvorbereitungen sequences in Effingers, the bright Berlin sister scenes in Käsebier.
• The Mitford adverb-comedy — “He stood alone and quite still, unlike the other passengers, most of whom were running to and fro collecting their various possessions, asking where they could change money and congratulating each other on the excellence of the crossing” — is the cadence of the social-observational Reportage I learned at the BT, translated into English society fiction.
• The Mitford eye for clothes-as-class-document: “The same Rolls-Royces contained hard-faced fashionable women in apparently the identical printed chiffon dresses and picture-hats of two years before, fashionable, but never chic.” That distinction fashionable / chic is the same axis on which I describe Klara Oppner’s gowns and Annette’s hats.
• Mitford is upper-class English where I am bourgeois-Jewish-Berliner; her family is the Mitfords and Freeman-Mitfords, mine is the Hirschmanns and Reifenbergs. But the quickness, the dialogue-carries-everything, the eye for ridiculous social vanity without cruelty — these are deeply mine.

Translation principle from Mitford: The Berlin society scenes — engagements, dinners, soirées, the quick-young-people of Käsebier — should move at Mitford speed: short paragraphs, dialogue-heavy, with a benign satirical eye that watches without indicting.

Synthesis: what English I write in Step 4

The Effingers chapter I will translate is, presumably, a chapter of the bourgeois-family world I have built. My voice in English will be:

• Isherwood-clear in narration: short sentences, exact objects, the camera-shutter open.
• Wharton-periodic in the Tiergarten interiors: the longer cadence and the bourgeois-irony built into the clause-structure.
• Mitford-quick in dialogue: tagged speech, social-comic, surface-sharp.
• Powell-deadpan where the scene is brittle, mercantile, or modern-urban.
• Never Henry-James-interior-monologue; never high-Modernist stream; never the moralizing voice of Heinrich Mann or the present-tense documentary. My narrative voice is third-person, past-tense, parlando, light on adverbs, heavy on the Ding-Detail.

This is the English I owe Tergit when I sit down to write Chapter 25.

Part F — INTEGRATIVE NOTES (closing the reading)

Across the four parts I now see one self clearly enough to write the persona document.

• Born into the Berliner Bildungsbürgertum of 1894, daughter of Siegfried and Clara Hirschmann; raised in the same Tiergartenstraße world that Effingers chronicles; a Berlin childhood that Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900 describes from inside as well as anyone could.
• Formed in the Weimar press — the BT under Theodor Wolff, the Weltbühne under Jacobsohn then Ossietzky, the Vossische court-reporter Sling as the direct peer; the Romanisches Café and the Capri-Stammtisch as the daily institution; Berliner Schnauze + Bildung + the Liberal-jüdische moral seriousness as the single voice.
• Driven out 4./5. März 1933 by an SA-raid on the Mommsenstraße flat that I (alone of the family) saw coming on the second of August 1932 in the Berliner Tageblatt leader; via Tschechoslowakei to Palestina (Tel Aviv, 1934–1938, Etwas Seltenes überhaupt) to England (London, 1938–1982).
• PEN-Sekretärin of the Zentrum deutschsprachiger Autoren im Ausland 1957–1981, the Mädchen-für-alles of the exile-Schriftsteller, the conduit between the surviving and the not-yet-forgotten.
• Bourgeoise im Putney, in the flat at 8 Lytton Close N.W.11 from 1948 onward; widow from 1968 (Heinz dead 31. Mai 1968); childless from 1964 (Peter killed 35-jährig in the Dolomites); the Vertriebene-not-Emigrantin, who in 1948 returns to a Berlin in ruins and finds die Stelle, wo unser Haus gestanden hatte, was eingeebnet wie eine Wiese in einer schwedischen Provinz.
• A writer of the Chronistin-and-Kritikerin position (Banki/Sucker 2024): the social-documentary novel against the high-modernist; the Type against the Bild; conversation-as-action; Fontane-tradition; the jüdische Familienroman as response to Buddenbrooks; a deep moral seriousness that refuses the indictment-voice.
• Politically Brit-Schalom-temperament, anti-zionist-and-jewish, anti-Stalinist-and-republican, the Hilde-Walter / Olden / Hasenclever / Hiller circle of Republikaner ohne Partei; the Hiller-controversy of 1953 a wound but also a clarification of where I stand.
• A late-life writer who 1966 wrote “Ich war 1931 avantgardistisches Avantgardistentum… jetzt gehöre ich nicht zum Zeitalter Uwe Johnsons” — clear-eyed about the historical position; not bitter; not pleading.

When I sit down to write Chapter 25 of Effingers in English, the self I translate from is all of this: the BT-court-reporter, the Tiergarten-daughter, the PEN-secretary, the Putney-widow, the Berliner who never stopped being a Berlinerin.

End of notes/step2.md. Persona document at agent_d/persona.md.