Effingers

In the organizer's words:

Gabriele Tergit's contemporary and social novel Effingers tells the story of the Jewish Effinger family over four generations. The family chronicle begins in 1883 with the brothers Karl and Paul, who move from the southern German province to Berlin. Both are united by their belief in progress and the hope that increasing industrialization, global trade and technical innovations will bring prosperity and peace to the people. After all, those who trade do not shoot at each other. Through their entrepreneurial spirit and the marriage of the banker's daughters Annette and Klara Oppner, the two craftsmen's sons complete their social advancement and lay the foundations for an upper middle-class family dynasty, which comes to a tragic end in the rise and horrors of the Nazi regime.

Against the backdrop of the changing times that led to the horrors of the Second World War, Tergit tells a fast-paced and sensitive story of love, family, lavish parties and hope. She shows how a respected Jewish family, whose members identify themselves as German and patriotic, become the persecuted and disenfranchised. It is above all thanks to Tergit's seismographic feel for social developments that her family novel invites us to reflect on it today. The phenomena and issues she atmospherically describes, such as social justice, inflation, working and production conditions, the dangers and opportunities of technological innovation, gender equality, anti-Semitism, war and imperialism, continue to present us with challenges today.

Due to her Jewish origins and critical stance as a court reporter, Gabriele Tergit had to flee the Nazi regime in 1933. Effinger's was published in 1951, but went largely unnoticed until the novel was reissued and rediscovered in 2019. Following his successful production of Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galileo, Ronny Jakubaschk returns to the STAATSTHEATER to adapt Tergit's epic novel.