I’m​ guessing that The Effingers is a roman fleuve – one of those plotty, fast-moving books, not overburdened with inwardness, that might have set Virginia Woolf’s teeth on edge. I say I guess because I don’t think I’ve read one before. I haven’t read Alex Haley, whose Roots is advertised on the back of my old German edition of The Effingers; or Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Waiting Room, a trilogy of the 1930s about a Jewish manufacturing family called the Oppermanns; not Anthony Trollope, or Anthony Powell, or John Galsworthy, whose writing desk was purchased by Gabriele Tergit for the karmic storage of her manuscripts. These are books that have a strong narrative beat and keep you turning the pages by virtue of speed, coverage and pressure of events. The Effingers – which had the working title ‘The Eternal Stream’ – is just such a novel. Over 800 pages and 150 chapters, it covers seven decades (1878-1948) in the lives of about thirty characters across four generations of the Oppner, Goldschmidt and Effinger families, charting the vicissitudes of their banking and manufacturing empires. It contains oodles of Grand Guignol, jiltings, fortunes, seductions, desertions, divorces, house moves, purchases, bankruptcies, children, wars, inflation. Meals. Asparagus. Rhenish. Goose. Let me count the geese. ‘Certainly, Madam, we’re Berliners, after all. A good roast goose is God’s great gift.’

Gabriele Tergit was born Elise Hirschmann in 1894 into a family of successful German Jewish industrialists. After completing a university education (rare at the time for a woman of her class – men don’t go for educated women, someone remarks in The Effingers), she became a journalist and a court reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt. In 1931 her satirical novel Käsebier Takes Berlin was published by Rowohlt to much acclaim. It is a marvellous example of Weimar prose, the intelligence of its commentary on unequal distribution almost masked by its seeming insouciance and all-round carbonation:

Ladies in fresh pale suits sat in front of cafés, wearing little hats on their little heads, drinking iced coffee and iced chocolate with straws. They were superbly manicured and massaged and creamed and rouged and whitened. Lambeck took in the air scented with freedom, brashness and benzene. One-legged men sat on the stone terrace of a large hotel.

The fabulous English translation of Käsebier Takes Berlin, like that of The Effingers, is by Sophie Duvernoy: the former shows off her liveliness, the latter her flexibility and stamina.

After the success of Tergit’s first novel, her publisher wanted another. A good part of the reading and book-buying public was Jewish, Ernst Rowohlt cynically observed, and a long Jewish family history seemed a promising project. A sort of Jewish Buddenbrooks, though The Effingers doesn’t have the purpose, the control or the independence of Thomas Mann’s novel; rather, it sits, like a sort of flywheel or epiphenomenon, on history. Its argument is that of history: the way that over the course of the empire, the First World War and the Weimar Republic, socialism in Germany makes way for National Socialism, with disastrous effects for the commercial and cultural elite of German Jews. ‘Perhaps this is part of the tragedy of the German people,’ one character observes. ‘The poor can’t help but turn to a nationalism that is not only empty but hostile to their own interests.’ In the end The Effingers didn’t appear for twenty years. By the time it was poorly published in 1951 (not by Rowohlt), most of its intended readers had either been murdered or were scattered over five continents, and those who remained were hardly disposed to read a nuanced celebration-turned-commemoration of the cultural convergence of Jews and Germans.

Tergit had left Berlin in March 1933. She fled to Czechoslovakia and from there to Palestine, where she spent a couple of unhappy years, before emigrating to the UK. In 1938 she settled in London with her husband and son; she wrote books about flowers and gardening and served as secretary of the German-speaking branch of PEN. Her work was rediscovered once before, when she appeared at the literary festival Berliner Festwochen in 1977. Käsebier Takes Berlin and The Effingers were both republished in German, and she completed a lively, chatty memoir, Etwas Seltenes Überhaupt (‘Something Altogether Rare’), which came out just after her death in 1983. Another long novel, So war’s eben (‘Just the Way It Was’), remained unpublished until 2021. The current boom in Tergit’s reputation is her third go-around and owes much to Nicole Henneberg’s biography, which was published in 2024, and to Duvernoy’s translations.

The Effingers is a remarkable way of rendering history. That said, stasis, being, durée, existence, longueurs don’t make much of an appearance. Tergit’s chosen mode wasn’t right for that, or perhaps her artistry was insufficient. But one’s sense of the trends, vectors, angles and slopes – the boom and the bust, the squeeze into or out of a crisis – is acutely conveyed. It feels like tracing time on a graph with one’s forefinger: cultural time, social, anthropological time. While I quickly lost my belief in the characters (much less my ability to tell them apart), the novel did feel like an ideal way of being told things. What better way of understanding history – especially social or cultural history – than reading a documentary novel like this?

Forget story, forget characters (both overrated in any case): it’s the way that after an elaborate, formal, exquisite, French-style meal, the men would go down into the cellar and drink draught beer. It’s that couples didn’t touch or kiss in public, unless they were at a railway station. It’s that wealthy businessmen – again, always men – would get together regularly to reread Homer in the original, or sometimes Horace. It’s that trade and industry were both socially unacceptable, even in the early 20th century. It’s that the light in Berlin was, by common agreement among painters who took off for Italy or the Midi, unsuitable or inadequate. It’s the memory of a Berlin before the Ku’damm. It’s the sudden appearance, just before the First World War, of ‘aluminium cookware’. It’s the presentation of a family based mainly in Berlin and in a small country town in Franconia, but with other members established in London, Paris, Warsaw and the US. It’s the Selbstverständlichkeit – the quiet self-assurance – whereby references to specifically Jewish things barely occurred in assimilated German Jewish families. (I don’t recall seeing the word ‘kosher’ in the book.) It’s the appearance, in a chapter called ‘A New Generation’, of a radical style in female fashion: ‘Suddenly, two women burst through a door. One was wearing a very short skirt, knee-high boots and a shabby fur coat. Her hair had been cut into bangs, and the strands hung down to her eyebrows.’ It’s the phenomenon, after Versailles, of borders, followed a few years later by the exhilaration of crossing them, as newly prosperous Europeans rediscovered foreign travel. This sense, not so much of the great liquid body of life as of the wavelets and ripples criss-crossing it, is marvellous.

Early in the novel there is a description of the workshop of a provincial Jewish watchmaker, one of the patriarchs of the book, Mathias Effinger: ‘The room ticked in a great cacophony, like a regiment of woodpeckers.’ Such spindles and cogs and wheels and gears are kept turning throughout the book. A couple of refrains are deployed, one of them faux-naif: ‘What a beautiful spring day, that Saturday in March 1887! How sweet the air was at ten o’clock in the morning!’ And then at eleven, and one, and three, and five, and on other days and other years. And then there is the attention to capitalist cycles of boom and bust. One variant goes: ‘In America, the harvest was underway. As usual, Black people picked cotton, kerchiefs on their heads. As usual, the farmers in Canada harvested wheat. The cotton was gathered into great bundles and sent off on ships; the wheat was gathered in large silos and sent off on ships. The harvest was meagre. Prices rose.’ Unless it was the Great Depression, in which case:

In America, the harvest was underway. As usual, the farmers in Canada harvested wheat. As usual, Black people picked cotton, kerchiefs on their heads. The harvest was huge, the earth bountiful. But no one could buy the wheat. Machines, not people, now worked in the cities, and the people had no work, and since people were only paid for work, they weren’t paid at all. Without money, no one could buy wheat, bread or clothes.

Erratic public events form a structure: the slump of the 1870s, the death from cancer of Frederick III after a reign of just 99 days, the dismissal of Bismarck, and so on. Tergit isn’t stingy with dates, so the reader generally knows where they are. Cultural markers are used, often bundled for effect: ‘Since she had seen Waldemar’s newly acquired paintings, the Monet, the Pissarro and the Renoir, it had become clear to her that this was where her talents lay.’ ‘Marianne and he were in complete agreement that capitalism was untenable, that one had to work to change things, and that the novels of Jakob Wassermann, Bernhard Kellermann and Thomas Mann were a revelation, as were Max Reinhardt’s stage productions.’ ‘Who can go on living since Freud?’ someone remarks. ‘Our attitudes towards love are changing,’ Theodor says. ‘Ibsen has finally liberated women.’

Omniscience is Tergit’s friend, and she handles it effectively, if not always with great subtlety. Characters’ private thoughts are rendered in italics; whispers are no hindrance to comprehension; newspaper articles and lectures are excerpted and tossed in; people exchange letters that are as straightforwardly declarative and as essentialist as arias. As I say, the book handles change better than stasis, but its real strength lies in the materialism of its description of meals, of interiors, of costumes. An engagement party from the 1880s is little more than a catalogue – or several catalogues – but it comes alive in its plurals and its precision, its fairground garishness, its late Victorian stodge. What’s remarkable is the way Tergit seems to skip along nimbly and unencumberedly through so much junk:

Bankers and councillors of all stripes came; Wendlein, painter and professor at the academy, came; Great-Aunt Goldschmidt, old and extremely elegant, rumoured to have known Rahel Varnhagen, arrived in a palanquin, clutching a cane with a silver handle. Steffen and red-faced Meyer from the factory came, and so did Hartert. They had sent old German plates made of tin, tapestries depicting the Trumpeter of Säckingen, bronze statues made not of bronze but of cast zinc, youths with geese and delicate female busts called ‘reveries’, Turkish smoking tables, colourful glasswork for the windows, an enormous quantity of Meissen porcelain – cherubs with anvils, cherubs making shoes, hammering cherubs – red majolica urns with zinc rims, green glass punchbowls and boxes of silverware.

Duvernoy’s translation keeps up the pressure all the way through, adapting effortlessly to new vocabularies and continually changing taste and circumstance. She has wisely chosen not to date it or place it in any special way, though expressions such as ‘Enjoy!’ or words like ‘scam’, ‘flub’ and ‘fart’ (as in ‘old fart’) are surely out of place. One sentence – ‘Geez, Wanda, that’s a bummer’ – can only have been the result of a dare.