In 1948, the German-Jewish writer Gabriele Tergit (1894-1982) returned to Berlin from exile in England. In that city, until Hitler’s takeover of power in 1933, she was a famous journalist, who with her court reports for the left-liberal Berlin Tageblatt made a name. In 1931 she also achieved literary fame with her metropolis novel Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm.
But by 1948 her reputation was gone, because the world to which she owed it had been destroyed. It would determine her literary fate. So got Effingers, her magisterial family epic about the downfall of the German Jews, received little attention when published in 1951, because it confronted the Germans with their anti-Semitism, which dates back to the Imperial era. Tergit would have to wait until 1977 for the book to receive the praise it deserved. But it only became a bestseller in 2020, when Tergit’s work was rediscovered. From that year on, a previously unpublished book from her literary estate was regularly published, culminating in the novel So war’s eben (2021), in which post-war German anti-Semitism also takes a beating.
A literary gem from 1948 has now emerged from that legacy, The first Zug nach Berlin, which recently also appeared in translation. It is a wonderful satire with a lot of black humour, with which Tergit shows what she found in Berlin at the time.
In less than 125 pages, Tergit rapidly stages a series of eccentric characters, who (sometimes in untranslated English) engage in fierce, painfully comical discussions. The main character is 19-year-old Maud, a beautiful American rich man’s daughter. Out of a thirst for adventure, she goes to Berlin, where she joins a British-American mission that, among other things, is to set up a newspaper for the moral re-education of the Germans. She ends up in a company in which the self-interest of the Allies counts. For example, the British Gauntlett is mainly interested in keeping Great Britain (racially) pure and for the American Bromwich, protecting the US economy is especially important. Only the American journalist Merton, who, like Tergit, believes that you can only read the truth in a newspaper, shows any humanity. But it eventually costs him his life when he discovers that the ‘good’ Germans he has hired for his newspaper are ex-Nazis.
Tergit shows that anti-Semitism in Germany has not disappeared after 1945. For many, Hitler is still a hero. His reign “was the only time when the Germans were a happy people,” a young man tells Maud, for example. And a taxi driver, who denies ever having been a Nazi, claims that everything went exactly as Hitler predicted, according to brochures he receives from Argentina.
Maud’s eyes are opened when the charming journalist Stegman, with whom she is in love, turns out to have been an employee of Goebbels. But the climax in the novel is reached when Countess Wandsdorff, who is holding soirees for the Allies, turns out to have stolen her paintings from a Jewish art dealer and her furniture from a Polish count.
Tergit has been through it all herself. Through her eyes you discover a truth that many did not think possible. Also because after a war the perpetrators usually claim to have known nothing.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 21, 2023.