Tergit’s novel, hitherto unavailable in English, is in part a roman à clef, narrated in unadorned, matter-of-fact prose. The Effinger family is a blend of urban and rural, secular and religious, socialist and capitalist, its paterfamilias a watchmaker in a small German town, his children striving to find their places in the world as the 20th century nears. Benno, the oldest, works in a clothing factory; Karl is a bank apprentice in Berlin; Paul is a laborer who dreams of becoming an industrialist. Only Willy, the youngest son, has any interest in his father’s trade, while the older daughter, Helene, is engaged to be married. All find themselves in a Germany that is soon to be unrecognizable in changing times, with Benno taunting Paul, “You want German Romanticism, lilacs and half-timbered houses and strolls outside the city gates, and yet you want gas engines too.” Those gas engines will come along in the form of tanks on the frontlines of World War I, but well before then, the family is constantly reminded of its outsider status. Indeed, the world grows much darker for the Effingers and their kin: Paul, who has fulfilled his dream by founding a factory that builds the first “people’s car,” only to have it torn away from him by the rising Nazi regime, while Erwin, one of Karl’s sons and a war hero, proclaims, “We must stop lying to ourselves and admit that we love a Germany that no longer exists…the Germans of today are strangers to us.” He’s right, as Paul laments, “I believed in the good in people—that was the gravest error of my misguided life.” Pensive and full of foreshadowing, Tergit’s novel nonetheless suggests that things might have been otherwise, about which translator Duvernoy, in her helpful commentary, notes that the book, published in 1951, predated Germany’s full “postwar reckoning with the Holocaust.”
