Kasebier Takes Berlin

Description

In Berlin, 1930, the name Kasebier 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 labourers, secretaries, and shopkeepers. Until the press shows up. In the blink of an eye, this everyman is made a star: one who can sing songs for a troubled time. Margot Weissmann, the arts patron, hosts champagne breakfasts for Kasebier; Muschler the banker builds a theatre in his honour; Willi Frachter, a parvenu writer, makes a killing from Kasebier-themed business ventures and books. All the while, the journalists who catapulted Kasebier to fame watch the monstrous media machine churn in amazement - and are aghast at the demons they have unleashed.

Gabriele Tergit (1894-1982), born Elise Hirschmann, was a German novelist and reporter. She began writing newspaper articles in the early 1920s under the psuedonym Tergit and eventually became a court reporter for the Berliner Tageblatt. She rose to fame in 1931 with the success of her first novel, Kasebier Takes Berlin. In 1933 she narrowly evaded arrest by the Nazis, fleeing first to Czechoslovakia and then to Palestine before settling in London with her husband and son. There, she worked on her colossal novel of generations of German-Jewish life, The Effingers (1951), and acted as secretary of the PEN Centre for German-language writers abroad.