Tergit

Gabriele Tergit (1894-1982)

Gabriele Tergit’s given name was Elise Hirschmann. She was born in East Berlin to a well-off Jewish family. Her father owned cable factories and a car tyre factory. Her first newspaper article was published in 1915 – this was the year she adopted the pen-name of Gabriele Tergit, because at the time it was frowned upon for a young woman from a well-off family to work as journalist. In 1928 she married the architect Heinrich Reifenberg and became Elise Reifenberg. However she is known today under her literary pseudonym Gabriele Tergit.

From 1919 to 1923 she studied history, philosophy and sociology, first in Munich, then in Heidelberg, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1925 she completed her PhD on the scientist and liberal politician Karl Vogt, who was a representative at the first German national parliament in 1848-49. One of Tergit’s professors in Munich was the sociologist Max Weber. Like Weber she was a political liberal who was opposed to Marxism; unlike Weber she affirmed the need for social security programmes in line with the conservative sociologist Gustav Schmoller, whom she cites at length in Chapter 17 of her novel Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm; Käsebier takes Berlin (1931; English translation 2019).

From 1920 onwards Tergit worked full time as a journalist, first as a freelancer. Then she worked as a court correspondent, first for the Berliner Börsen-Courier (1923-24) and then for the Berliner Tageblatt (1924-33). She also contributed regularly to Carl von Ossietzky’s journal Die Weltbühne, using another pseudonym: that of the Enlightenment author, Christian Thomasius. Her many friends in Berlin included the novelist Georg Hermann (known as ‘the Jewish Fontane’), the city planner and architectural critic Werner Hegemann, and the playwright Felix Joachimson, who later wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood film Destry Rides Again (1939).

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, the Reifenbergs moved first to Czechoslovakia and then to Palestine. During her five years in Palestine she wrote a book about the political situation in Palestine which was critical of the Zionist movement; the book was never published. Tergit described it as follows: ‘Ich habe einen Journalistenbuch über Palästina geschrieben, mehr kontra als pro, ich kann nun einmal Nationalismus in keiner Verkleidung leiden’ (‘I have written a book of journalism about Palestine, more contra than pro, I cannot stand nationalism in any guise’ – Tergit, letter of May 1946 to Ernst Rowohlt, held in the Deutsches Literarturarchiv (DLA) in Marbach, quoted in Hans Wagener, pp. 70-71).

In 1938 the family moved to London, where Tergit spent the rest of her life. She had been a member of the writers’ association PEN since 1931, and from 1957 to 1981 she worked as the secretary of the PEN centre for German-speaking authors living outside Germany.

Tergit is best known for her novel Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm; Käsebier takes Berlin (1931; English translation 2019).

She also wrote an epic family novel, Effingers (1951; English translation 2025) which can be seen as a German-Jewish pendant to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks.

A further novel, So war’s eben (That’s How It Was) was published for the first time by Schöffling & Co. in 2021.

Tergit’s works include:

Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931) Käsebier Takes Berlin (literally: Käsebier conquers the Kurfürstendamm), English translation 2019

Effingers (1951), English translation 2025

Das Büchlein vom Bett (1954) The Little Book of Beds

Kaiserkron und Päonien rot. Kleine Kulturgeschichte der Blumen (1958) Imperial Lilies and Red Peonies. A Short Cultural History of Flowers

Das Tulpenbüchlein (1965) The Little Book of Tulips

Etwas Seltenes überhaupt. Erinnerungen (1983) Something Strange. Memoirs

Atem einer anderen Welt. Berliner Reportagen (1994) The Air of Another World. Berlin Reports

Im Schnellzug nach Haifa (1996) Express Train to Haifa

Wer schießt aus Liebe? Gerichtsreportagen (1999) Who shoots out of love? Reports from Court

Der erste Zug nach Berlin (2000) The First Train to Berlin

Frauen und andere Ereignisse. Publizistik und Erzählungen von 1915 bis 1970 (2001) Women and Other Events. Journalism and Stories, 1915-1970

So war’s eben (2021) That’s How It Was

English Translations

Gabriele Tergit, Käsebier Takes Berlin, trans. by Sophie Duvernoy (New York: NYRB Classics, 2019)/(London: Pushkin Press, 2020)

Gabriele Tergit, Effingers, trans. by Sophie Duvernoy (New York: NYRB Classics, 2025)

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Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931); Käsebier Takes Berlin

[literally: Käsebier conquers the Kurfürstendamm]

The title character is a folk singer, Georg Käsebier (literally: Cheese-beer), who is catapalted to overnight fame when the famous novelist Otto Lambeck writes a glowing review of his show. But Käsebier is only an extra in this novel. The novel is not about Käsebier, but about the way he – or rather, his image – is exploited by everyone around him: the media, Berlin high society, property developers, financiers, toy manufacturers, the list goes on and on. The novel portrays the decline of the Weimar Republic in various ways, through the short-lived career of Käsebier himself, through the decline in quality of the newspaper, which is run into the ground by the unscrupulous publicist Willi Frächter, a fictional disciple of Alfred Hugenberg, the right-wing press baron, and through the property speculation scheme which collapses due to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and which leads to a bank collapse. The main protagonists of the book are the liberal journalists Miermann and Fräulein Dr. Lotte Kohler, who work for the Berliner Rundschau, a liberal newspaper loosely based on the Berliner Tageblatt where Tergit was employed. Although they are very highly educated people, both of them are too wrapped up in their own concerns to prevent the disaster unfolding.