In 1932, the Berlin-born writer Gabriele Tergit set out to memorialise what she saw as a disappearing world: the lives and fates of the city’s Jews. By 1945, after fleeing the Nazis first to Czechoslovakia, then Palestine, then Britain, Tergit had finished her novel, but it took until 1951 for The Effingers to be published. Even then, only a few German booksellers wanted it in their shops. It was too strange a piece of work for a German public that had watched, if not participated, in the Holocaust.

Though overlooked at the time, it has been rediscovered as a classic in Germany, and has now been published in English for the first time. It is a chronicle of three affluent Jewish families in Berlin between 1878 and 1942, with an epilogue set in 1948, based on Tergit’s return visit to her destroyed city. Tergit understood how dangerous the Nazis were. She was a court reporter and covered Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels on trial in the 1920s – this also made her a target, and she fled Berlin after narrowly escaping an SA (“Brownshirts”) raid in March 1933.

It is eerie, reading The Effingers in 2025, that the Nazis’ rise to power is something that happens largely on the periphery of the protagonists’ lives. There is a sense that while they recognise them as bad actors, they nevertheless feel themselves insulated from the Nazis in their extravagant villas in Tiergarten, with their good dresses and connections.

A similar atmosphere of overhanging political danger is apparent in Cabaret, the 1972 film based on the Berlin novels of Christopher Isherwood. The Weimar republic is portrayed as a hedonistic time, and the Nazis only emerge slowly from the background. One character even says: “The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans – but they do serve a purpose: let them get rid of the communists and later we’ll be able to control them.” The sense of looming but underappreciated danger struck me as something........

© The Guardian