Introduction: Liberal Critique

GABRIELE TERGIT (1894–1982), born Elise Hirschmann, was a respected journalist and court correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt (Berlin Daily News) from 1924 to 1933. Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm (1931; Käsebier Conquers the Kurfürstendamm), her first novel, is set against the background of the Wall Street crash of October 24, 1929, and its devastating consequences for Germany. The novel is also informed by a Berlin corruption scandal that began on September 26, 1929. The three Sklarek brothers, clothing retailers, had a government contract to supply clothes for civil servants; they forged receipts somewhere in the region of ten million marks. The scandal provided considerable fuel for National Socialist propaganda. In early 1932 Tergit reported on the trial of Moritz Rosenthal, a business partner of the Sklareks, pointing out that he was at the same time an administrator and beneficiary of public funds. The emerging details of the Sklareks’ backroom deals certainly influenced the composition of Käsebier. The novel depicts German liberalism in crisis. The collapse of the monarchy in 1918 had led to a “Sinnkrise” (crisis of meaning) for the educated middle classes, as they lost the special entitlement they had enjoyed in the Wilhelmine state; the idea of Bildung was stripped of its prestige and was replaced by the worship of money. That year the liberal author Carl Sternheim commented on the intellectual bankruptcy of the German nation, remarking

Sternheim argues that humanist values such as Geist (a term that combines aspects of “intellect” and “spirit” and will henceforth be left untranslated) and Bildung have been replaced with economic rhetoric: