Effingers

In 1933, court reporter and author Gabriele Tergit had to flee Germany. Her epic novel about two Jewish families, told from their living rooms, is a precise observation on the dynamic rise as well as the stealthy decline of a bourgeois world between 1870 and 1939. One experiences the swansong of the empire, the First World War, the Spanish flu, the formation of the republic, the seizure of power by the Nazis, and mercantile families. The collapse into fascism occurs at first unnoticed, completely underestimated, but the destruction is all the more complete.