Käsebier Takes Berlin

by Gabriele Tergit, Sophie Duvernoy (Translator), Sophie Duvernoy (Introduction)

Overview

In English for the first time, a panoramic satire about the star-making machine, set in celebrity-obsessed Weimar Berlin.

In Berlin, 1930, the name Käsebier is on everyone’s lips. A literal combination of the German words for “cheese” and “beer,” it’s an unglamorous name for an unglamorous man—a small-time crooner who performs nightly on a shabby stage for laborers, secretaries, and shopkeepers. Until the press shows up.

In the blink of an eye, this everyman is made a star: a star who can sing songs for a troubled time. Margot Weissmann, the arts patron, hosts champagne breakfasts for Käsebier; Muschler the banker builds a theater in his honor; Willi Frächter, a parvenu writer, makes a mint off Käsebier-themed business ventures and books. All the while, the journalists who catapulted Käsebier to fame watch the monstrous media machine churn in amazement—and are aghast at the demons they have unleashed.

In Käsebier Takes Berlin, the journalist Gabriele Tergit wrote a searing satire of the excesses and follies of the Weimar Republic. Chronicling a country on the brink of fascism and a press on the edge of collapse, Tergit’s novel caused a sensation when it was published in 1931. As witty as Kurt Tucholsky and as trenchant as Karl Kraus, Tergit portrays a world too entranced by fireworks to notice its smoldering edges.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681372723
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	07/30/2019
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	486,499
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Gabriele Tergit (1894–1982) was a novelist and journalist, known initially for her courtroom reporting. After gaining fame for Käsebier Takes Berlin, her writing career was cut short when the Nazis rose to power in 1933. She immediately fled to Czechoslovakia, then Palestine, and finally London. After the war, her work was largely forgotten by the public, but she continued to work on behalf of other authors as the honorary secretary of the London PEN Centre of expatriate German-speaking authors.

Sophie Duvernoy has translated work by Sibylle Berg, Sabine Rennefanz, and Zora del Buono, and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Thomson Reuters, and other publications. She is the winner of the 2015 Gutekunst Prize for young translators and is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University.

Editorial Reviews

11/26/2018
Originally published in 1931, Tergit’s arch satire is an amusing but bleak morality tale about cultural philistinism. The novel’s central theme is inflation: as the cost of goods meteorically rises in Weimar Berlin, so does the reputation of a schmaltzy singer named Käsebier. Unprepossessing and “unbelievably kitschy,” Käsebier nonetheless becomes a sensation with his earnest renditions of folk songs and fatuous comic numbers. Tergit documents Käsebier’s rise and fall into irrelevance through the lens of Berlin’s journalistic, high-society, and financial circles. Covering the performer are the urbane, old-school reporters at the Berliner Rundschau newspaper. When an obnoxious, energetic disrupter buys the paper, the staff is forced to lower their elevated style (and salaries) to please the new owner. Insouciant socialites sumptuously fete Käsebier, “a child of the people,” while the economy teeters on the brink of collapse. Bankers and developers team up on a poorly timed, poorly planned, and poorly executed construction project offering large apartments no one can afford and a new theater for Käsebier no one will attend. Portraying a society declining into fascism, the novel resounds with hollow laughter and is crisp throughout, but the journalistic sections feel most alive. These tableaus, which blend absurdism and poignancy, match the comic invention of classics like Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"Portraying a society declining into fascism, the novel resounds with hollow laughter and is crisp throughout, but the journalistic sections feel most alive. These tableaus, which blend absurdism and poignancy, match the comic invention of classics like Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning and Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop.” —Publishers Weekly

“In a pace that’s intensely frenetic, Tergit captures the pulse of the period brilliantly in her prose – light and airy, comic and satirical, but also dark and profound...Käsebier Takes Berlin is an excellent novel well worth reading.” —Radhika’s Readers Retreat

"A star is born, Weimar-style, in this German novel originally published in 1931....Tergit's novel deserves a place alongside Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, and other key works of the period." —Kirkus

"Tergit's prose is energetically rendered by Sophie Duvernoy. . .Tergit's gift for engaging dialogue enlivens the novel. But beneath the witty comedy and acute observation lies a sober reminder of the dangers brewing: references to mounting debt and widespread bankruptcy; and as the election posters go up, auctions are held and suitcases of the vulnerable stand ready." —Rebecca K. Morrison, TLS

From the Publisher

2018-10-28

A star is born, Weimar-style, in this German novel originally published in 1931.

Käsebier—his name combining the German words for beer and cheese—is a, well, cheesy sort of lounge singer in beery little clubs along the Kurfürstendamm. He sings a few lieder, makes a few marks that are worth less and less in the spiraling inflation of Berlin at the dawn of the Depression era. All that changes when a columnist writes an approving piece in a local paper, which sets wheels in motion: Soon other papers are noticing him, with one left-wing journal hailing Käsebier as a "fundamentally German talent…a sort of combined court minstrel and popular poet, an extraordinary union of natural musicality and popular humor," while a right-wing tabloid thunders, "Repugnant foreign Jews, plagued with hundreds of oversophisticated strands of thought, abuse the German language to praise a socialist who is debasing our people's greatest treasure, the folk song, and misusing it for its own vain ambitions." Tergit (1894-1982), herself a German Jew and journalist specializing in courtroom cases, turns an unsparingly satirical eye on the press and culture of the Weimar era, and especially on the machinery that surrounds popular culture, from adoring writers and cynical publishers to the mucky-muck capitalists who combine to erect a would-be empire around Käsebier—at first trifles like rubber dolls, shoes, and cigarettes ("Käsebier melior for 5 pennies, Käsebier bonus for 3, Käsebier optimus 8 pennies") but then an opera house surrounded by a fashionable housing and shopping complex. It's not long before the fad passes and fortunes fail, and in the end the blameless Käsebier finds himself singing for his supper out near the Polish frontier even as Berliners are starting to work words like "Sieg" into everyday speech and to realize that, as one character shrewdly observes, "if the election results in a minority for the grand coalition, our only option will be dictatorship."

Tergit's novel deserves a place alongside Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, and other key works of the period.

Kirkus Reviews