Praise for Käsebier:
“[A]mong the most significantly revealing works of Weimar-era Germany. […] Ninety years later, Käsebier Takes Berlin is fascinating to read in light of what transpired shortly afterwards through fifteen years of terror, mass murder and extermination, with the serious societal dislocation that followed publication of the novel. The work is translated judiciously into English with careful attention to how to render Berlin modes of speech plausibly by Sophie Duvernoy, who also writes the introduction.”—Paddy Kehoe, Raidió Teilifís Éireann
“[R]emarkably topical today […] Anyone who has seen Sky’s Berlin Babylon, set in Berlin at the same time as Käsebier, will have a sense of Tergit’s novel and the world in which it is set. Above all, though, it is about how fragile German society was at the beginning of the 1930s. […] Käsebier, now revived by Pushkin Press, is a perfect introduction to Gabriele Tergit’s work.”—David Herman, The Jewish Chronicle
“Tergit’s prose is sharp and confident, full of brilliant associative leaps. Duvernoy’s translation is impressive, especially in long stretches of dialogue, many of which have the well-honed feel of the wittiest film noir repartee. […] To read Käsebier Takes Berlin today, more than 80 years after its original publication, is to experience occasional shocks of recognition.”—Ben Sandman, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“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
“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
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.