Once I’d got my teeth into Tergit, I wasn’t going to let go. Käsebier was splendid. Berlin in the twenties is a somewhere, somewhen I wish I had been to, and here was a woman broadcasting live from the thick of it. She was a journalist and court reporter, too. I have still to track down her own memoir, but on my latest pilgrimage to Dussmann on Friedrichstraße, I did track down another fat novel. This saga spans the decades from Germany’s unification to its division. And the family at the heart of it is Jewish, but was it a Jewish novel or not? Would their compatriots also see the Effingers as German? The conflictedness around this grows, leading to destruction. Tergit returned to her home city in 1948, and worked that visit into the epilogue. Her second novel was finally published in 1951, but finding a publisher took a while.
The hero of this story, as Nicole Henneberg says in her afterword, is time itself. The sweep of history with all its detail about how people ate and lived and worked and – above all, for dialogue is Tergit’s real gift – talked to each other. When the story begins, Friedrichstraße, where I bought it in paperback 150 years later, is not even a street, really. It’s fields, then a building site, then smart facades… then ruins. On that visit to Berlin this July, when I bought my copy of Effingers, I hadn’t long read Käsebier and walked down Kurfürstendamm with the past at my shoulder. The Pride parade and Kaufrausch mixed with history. I only lived in Berlin twenty years ago, so my nostalgic sense of change and loss pales before Tergit’s. But what I enjoyed in Effingers was the up-and-comingness, the sense of possibilities and progress, however much that changed with the times.
Sofie Duvernoy, who translated Käsebier takes Berlin, is working on Effingers with funding from the US National Endowment of the Arts. You will have to ask her how long it will take to come out in English, but at nine hundred pages, it is no small undertaking. This is not a rapid read, but it lets you into the sweep of time. Effingers is worth the wait.
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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