Near the end of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers, a novel about three generations of a wealthy German Jewish family, Lotte Effinger goes to the Berlin theater where she is a starring actress, under the stage name Angelika Oppen. It is early 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, and she finds that the theater has been taken over by a former bit player who is an ardent Nazi. Carrying out the regime’s orders, he has fired Lotte and replaced her with an “Aryan leading lady, [who] will embody the German artistic ideal with her blond beauty.”

Warned that a “death squad” is heading to the theater, Lotte goes to a café and calls home, where a maid tells her, “The SA was here and wanted to take you away.” There is no time to ponder: she decides to flee to Czechoslovakia and asks her maid to pack her suitcase and send it to the train station. On the way there, Lotte looks at the streets where she has spent her entire life and reflects, “I’ll never see any of this again.”

How many of us would have the presence of mind to act the same way—to recognize when it’s time to flee our country forever, without hesitating like Lot’s wife on her way out of Sodom? Few German Jews had it in 1933. More typical was the reaction of Victor Klemperer, whose diary of the Nazi years was published in Germany in 1995, thirty-five years after his death, under the title Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I Will Bear Witness). He described the reign of terror after the Nazis’ election victory on March 5, 1933: “It’s astounding how easily everything collapses…. No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid.”

But it did not occur to Klemperer, a fifty-two-year-old professor of French literature, to pack a bag and leave. Instead, life went on. “I ordered a lot of books for my department, since it turned out there was still 100M left in my budget,” he noted on March 10. Not until Kristallnacht, the nationwide pogrom in November 1938, did Klemperer start to think seriously about fleeing Germany, and even then he wasn’t sure it was really necessary: “In the end we shall literally be able to throw dice for pro and contra.”

It was easier to face facts if one was already a public opponent of the Nazis. Then there could be no false sense of security. Lotte Effinger isn’t political; like almost everyone in her wealthy, assimilated clan, she hardly thinks about politics or about being Jewish until the Nazis make it unavoidable. But Tergit was political, and her experience in 1933 underlies Lotte’s story.

Like Angelika Oppen, Gabriele Tergit was a pseudonym, adopted by Elise Hirschmann when she began her career as a journalist in the 1920s. Born in Berlin in 1894, she started writing for newspapers while working on a doctorate in history and became a staff writer for the Berliner Tageblatt, a leading liberal newspaper. Tergit’s successful first novel, Käsebier Takes Berlin (1931), offered a cynical insider’s view of how the journalistic sausage gets made. When a newspaper finds itself with an empty space on the front page at press time, the editor fills it with a puff piece on a minor local singer named Käsebier (“Cheese-beer”), inadvertently turning him into a national celebrity.

Tergit specialized in reporting on criminal trials, which in the Weimar Republic often had a political dimension. In 1932 she found herself sitting a few feet away from Hitler and Goebbels at a trial involving a former Nazi leader: “If I had had a revolver and shot them, I would have saved fifty million people from a premature death,” she wrote in her autobiography decades later. Tergit’s coverage of such trials earned her a place on the Nazis’ enemies list, and on March 4, 1933, a group of storm troopers showed up at her apartment. Her husband, Heinz Reifenberg, an architect, told their maid not to open the door, which Tergit credited with saving her life. The next day she fled to Czechoslovakia, leaving her husband and child behind, like Lotte Effinger.

Eight months later the family was reunited in Palestine, where they lived for the next five years. In Effingers, Lotte’s cousin Marianne makes the same journey and ends up living contentedly on a kibbutz “composed of tents and wooden barracks” where she has no possessions but a bed and some books. It’s the sharpest possible contrast to the Berlin mansions oppressively stuffed with furniture and objets d’art in which the Effingers grew up.

But Marianne is happy—not because she is especially interested in Jewish nationalism but because she has always been drawn to self-sacrifice. Back in Germany, she had immersed herself in socialism, working as a municipal bureaucrat. In Zionism, Tergit suggests, she has found an even drearier and more Spartan way of life.

Lotte visits her cousin in Palestine but has no intention of staying there. She can’t imagine cutting herself off so completely from the culture and cosmopolitanism of European Jewish life. And neither could Tergit. In 1938 she and her family left Palestine for London, where she lived until her death in 1982. There she resumed work on Effingers, her magnum opus, which she had already begun to sketch before leaving Berlin.

The eight-hundred-page novel took more than a decade to write, and by the time it was finished, its subject—the German Jewish bourgeoisie, with all its worldly success, moral confusion, and disastrously false consciousness—had ceased to exist. The Holocaust is not narrated in the book, which essentially ends in 1933, with Lotte’s flight and the Nazis’ confiscation of the Effingers’ family business, an auto factory. Several brief chapters read like epilogues, including one that consists of a letter written by Paul Effinger, the family’s eighty-one-year-old patriarch, in 1942, on the eve of his deportation to a death camp. He acknowledges that he should have listened to his wife’s advice to leave Germany earlier, but “I believed in the good in people—that was the gravest error of my misguided life. Now we must pay for this mistake with our deaths.”

It seems unlikely that Tergit had read The Diary of Anne Frank when she wrote these lines. The manuscript of Effingers was completed in 1948, and the Diary didn’t appear in German until 1950. But Paul’s judgment about “the good in people” reads like a rebuttal of the most famous line in the Diary, which the fifteen-year-old Anne wrote on July 15, 1944: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.”

In the 1950s that affirmation helped make the Diary a worldwide best seller. The message of Effingers was much less palatable, and Tergit struggled to find a German publisher. When it finally came out in 1951, it attracted few readers and was soon forgotten. Tergit never published another work of fiction, though she had some success with nonfiction books on flowers and gardens. “It seems that flowers are more popular than Jews,” she observed wryly.

That had changed by the 2010s, when the German critic Nicole Henneberg launched a revival of Tergit’s work, editing a series of her books for Schöffling Verlag and writing the first biography of her, Gabriele Tergit. Zur Freundschaft begabt (Gabriele Tergit: Gifted in Friendship, 2024). New York Review Books introduced Tergit to America in 2019 with an English translation by Sophie Duvernoy of Käsebier Takes Berlin, and has now followed it with Duvernoy’s excellent translation of Effingers, making the novel accessible to American readers almost seventy-five years after its original publication.

In her informative and thoughtful afterword, Duvernoy warns the reader against a comparison made by many critics, including Paul Reitter on the back cover of this edition: “Although Effingers has been described as a ‘Jewish Buddenbrooks’ in scope and may well have taken some initial inspiration from Thomas Mann’s 1901 novel…the comparison only goes so far.” Still, it is impossible to avoid. Starting with the title—a family name, in the plural, with no introductory “the”—Tergit’s book is patterned after Mann’s. Both are rooted in the author’s family history and follow three generations of the family business.

The Buddenbrooks, like the Manns, are merchants in Lübeck. The Hirschmann family’s prosperity came from Deutsche Kabelwerke, founded by Gabriele Tergit’s father, Siegfried Hirschmann, and his brother Bernhard in the 1890s. It became one of Germany’s leading manufacturers of industrial cables and rubber tires, and the brothers continued to run the company until 1933, when they were arrested by the Gestapo; two years later the company was “Aryanized.” (In 2009, after a long legal battle, a German court awarded compensation to the heirs of the original shareholders.)

Effingers tells a slightly altered version of this story. As the novel begins, Paul Effinger decides to leave the town of Kragsheim, where the family has lived happily for generations, to open a screw-making factory in Berlin. After struggling to secure a loan and narrowly avoiding bankruptcy, Paul and his brother Karl establish Effingers as a successful business, and by the end of the novel it has become a famous automaker.

As Tergit tells the story, however, it’s never clear that Paul’s success justifies his original decision to leave home. He gets no pleasure from being rich; he is always dreaming of retirement but worrying the time isn’t right. His ideal remains his hometown, a human-scale society untroubled by heavy industry and class conflict. “When I think of Kragsheim, and how the people there live such quiet, happy lives, no rushing about, no great to-do,” Paul muses. It is also a place where there seems to be no conflict between being Jewish and being German. Paul and Karl’s aged father is the only member of the family who is described as religious, and a lovingly depicted Passover Seder in Kragsheim is the only scene of Jewish observance in the novel.

The next generation of Effingers, born into wealth around the turn of the twentieth century, lives a very different life in Berlin high society. Karl’s spoiled son James becomes an idler, notable only for his ability to seduce any woman who crosses his path. His son Herbert embezzles money from a bank and is sent off to America, the ultimate disgrace. Karl’s daughter Marianne and Paul’s daughter Lotte, who become the novel’s center of gravity, aren’t content to be married off like their mother and aunt, but they’re not sure what they want instead. They belong to a generation tormented by loss of purpose, hoping that art or socialism will give them a reason for living.

In this way, too, Effingers resembles Buddenbrooks: it is a story of decline, in which prosperity sows the seeds of decadence and ruin. Though they take place in different historical eras—Buddenbrooks from the 1830s to the 1870s, Effingers from the 1880s to the 1930s—both books use the fate of a family to make a judgment on modern German society, which sacrifices traditions and values on the altar of profit.

Beyond its architecture and themes, Effingers borrows several plot elements from its great predecessor. Antonie Buddenbrook, known as Tony, agrees to marry the man her father picked out for her, only to discover that he’s a drunken scoundrel. When he wastes all the money she brought to the marriage, she divorces him and moves back home. The same thing happens to Sofie Effinger; both characters also suffer a stillbirth.

Hanno Buddenbrook, the last scion of his family, dies of typhoid fever as a teenager, and Mann heightens the horror of the illness by introducing it with a clinical description as in a textbook: “Typhoid runs the following course: In the incubation period, a person feels depressed and moody…at the same time he is overcome by physical lassitude.” Fritz Effinger dies as a teenager in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which Tergit introduces this way: “Flu tends to progress as follows: In the spring, one comes down with a chill and fever, takes to one’s bed, remains in bed for eight days…”

Parallels so explicit should be considered homage rather than theft. Still, Duvernoy is right that comparing Tergit’s novel to Mann’s does the former a disservice. Buddenbrooks is a novel of ideas—above all, the idea that consciousness is a kind of disease. The family’s downfall is the result not of external forces such as war or revolution, but of an emerging strain of imaginative restlessness that makes each generation less suited than the one before to respectable flourishing. Mann uses the small city of Lübeck as a kind of petri dish where this process can unfold, barely disturbed by the convulsions of the wider world.

The story Tergit has to tell obviously requires a different approach. The Effinger family, too, shows signs of generational decline, but it doesn’t die a natural death; it is destroyed by external forces beyond its control or understanding. It would be impossible to write a family saga about German Jews from the age of Bismarck to the rise of Hitler without foregrounding history: the rise of nationalism under Kaiser Wilhelm II, the cultural revolution of the Weimar era, the demoralizing effects of hyperinflation, all culminating in the advent of Nazism, which promised to avenge every injury Germany had suffered.

Above all, Tergit shows, it was World War I that changed the trajectory of the Effingers, German Jewry, and Germany itself. On several occasions in the novel, Tergit pulls back to offer a panorama of Berlin at a particular moment in time. In March 1913, the city is still living in the nineteenth century: “Horses cantered and cars drove down Tiergartenstrasse. There were pretty women and elegant men.” Each member of the Effinger clan partakes of the city’s pleasures in their own way: Uncle Waldemar, an art collector, entertains his mistress “on an old tufted sofa under the Rembrandt”; Sofie receives and declines a marriage proposal from a “kind and clever, but nonetheless mediocre, businessman”; Marianne banters with Schröder, a young Marxist revolutionary whom she quietly loves.

Five years later, Germany has lost one of the deadliest wars in history and the twentieth century has arrived with a vengeance. The streets of Berlin are full of gunfire, and Communist revolutionaries briefly take over the Effinger factory. Women who used to be afraid of writing a love letter now attend fashionable orgies and become single mothers. Schröder begins to move from the extreme left to the extreme right; by the end of the novel he is a Nazi, though he remains fond of his old friend Marianne.

When Tergit began to work on Effingers in 1933, she was one of the first writers to undertake an autopsy of Germany and German Jewry. But the novel is appearing in English almost a century later, and by now most of what she has to say on the subject is familiar. Tergit is not a novelist of ideas, like Mann, but a journalist who condenses historical and political arguments into digestible summaries.

In a chapter entitled “The Jewish State,” for instance, two characters argue about Theodor Herzl’s Zionist pamphlet, neatly summarizing the case for and against Jewish nationalism. In a chapter called “Enlightenment,” Lotte sees a hypnotist use a spoon to hypnotize a chicken, and then goes to a Nazi rally where Hitler does the same thing to a crowd of human beings, leading them in a chant of hatred: “The Jew—the Jew—the Jew.” “He’s an unusually mad duck, that Hitler,” one character observes; like the novel itself, he’s registering an event rather than explaining it.

While Effingers has been rediscovered as a lost German Jewish classic, the literary power of the book in 2025 comes less from Tergit’s treatment of Jewish identity or German history than from her exploration of the lives of women. Scenes of the male-dominated worlds of business and war tend to feel like programmatic set pieces; it is in her descriptions of domestic life that Tergit reveals herself as an acute observer and interpreter. Like her contemporary Walter Benjamin in his memoir Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Tergit registers the changing zeitgeist through the evolution of furnishings and decorations. The Effingers’ houses are almost characters themselves, and their ultimate disgrace comes when Selma, the old matriarch, is forced to rent rooms in her mansion to lodgers.

Tergit is also constantly attentive to clothes, fabrics, and jewelry, and what they communicate about class and gender. At a dance after the war, Marianne wears “a long red velvet dress and a white veil over her blond hair, holding the arm of a gentleman in tails as if she were at a private party in around 1885.” It’s a sign of her failure to adapt, for this isn’t a society ball but a jazz dance attended by thousands of customers; the times belong to “a large, fat man in white trousers and an unbuttoned shirt and a small dark woman clad only in a short yellow silk shift.”

Tergit suggests that the twentieth-century revolution in gender and sexuality was as disorienting as war or economic crisis. For the older generation of Effinger women, courtship and marriage were straightforward. Women were commodities, valued according to their personal beauty and their family’s wealth, and their main duty in life was not to ruin their value by violating respectability.

The younger generation struggles against these expectations: Marianne joins the feminist movement; Lotte studies at a university. But in Tergit’s telling, the dizzying freedom of Weimar Germany, where sex is divorced from obligation, turns out to be even less conducive to women’s happiness. “Long live monogamy!” Lotte toasts, and eventually she finds it, though stability proves as elusive in this realm as in every other.

As things fall apart, the Effingers’ Jewishness, which they once barely noticed, moves to the center of their lives and of the novel. The ferocious return of Jew-hatred is undeniable but so hard to understand that it seems unreal. Just a generation earlier, Germany’s Jews considered themselves the most secure and successfully assimilated in Europe. Now they are back in the Middle Ages. At the hotel where Lotte stays upon her arrival in Czechoslovakia, she overhears a tourist talking about Communists back home in Germany: “They’ve already caught three men who’ve been poisoning wells.”

“I won’t go back to a country where they believe the wells are being poisoned,” Lotte declares. “Tomorrow they’ll go after the Jews, and the day after tomorrow, the witches.” Effingers does not explain what happened to the Germans and the Jews. Instead it captures an experience that we are increasingly familiar with today: the bewilderment of watching history go wrong without being able to understand or stop it.