Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm - a great city novel

 

I’ve finished Gabriele Tergit’s unfortunately named Berlin novel, Kasebier conquers Kurfurstendamm. She looked back on it – after the flight from Berlin to Prague, just before the SS came to her door, and the flight to Palestine, and the flight to London, and the bombs  falling and the destruction that decisively ended the moment of time caught in her novel and that no nostalgia, no tv serial or movie FX, will ever really disinter – and admitted that the title was one reason Hans Fallada or Erich Kästner is who we think about when we think about the Neue Sachlichkeit novel, the novel that is all sharp edges and jumpcuts.

Indeed, Tergit, because she is a woman, is read another way, with the common complaint being that she does not fill her characters with empathetic stuff that we can attach to and root for. This was definitely not her purpose in KCK -her purpose was to write a city novel, a novel that would plug into the various worlds that were changing Berlin and Germany – the media, entertainment, financing and above all construction. The novel is, because of this I think, much more gripping. And what operates like fate, here, what supplies our desire for Nemesis, is the complicated financial structure that underlay a largescale real estate project on Kurfurstendamm, which one knows is going to fail.

It does fail, and the bankruptcies at the end have an incredible symbolic power. It is as if these various rentier households, with their money invested in what turns out to be an incredibly risky bank, were bombed. Though written, of course, a decade before Berlin was bombed, Tergit’s account of these households with their old bourgeois treasures withering under the touch of the drastic mark-down that indifferent buyers and auctioneers place on these goods and chattels in essence rips them out of their histories, just as a bomb rips open a household and spills all its goods into the street..

I was all the more moved in the chapter where Doctor Kohler realizes that she has lost all her savings and must start selling her possessions because earlier this year, when we decided to remodel our apartment, we also put most of our things on the block. It is a near death experience. The sofa you think is worth 500 dollars? Throw it away. The table you have eaten at for years, that fine maplewood table - throw it away. Your son's bed? Throw it away. The markdown is not just economic, it is existential. You put your life, unconsciously, into your things. And bang bang bang, they are gone.

Tergit herself was, in the late twenties, one of Germany’s premier trial reporters – she reported on the various scandalous trials for the  Berliner Tageblatt. In the novel, a similar paper plays a decisive role, bringing together all of the characters. That paper, as well, is taken over and destroyed by some moneybags who install an odious character named Fraechter as the head of the paper. Sound familiar?

I am torn, here, by the urge to quote some of the amazing passages in the book and the urge to simply recommend this rather great novel for your summer time reading. I think I’ll leave it like this.