Käsebier Takes Berlin
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In English for the first time, a panoramic satire about the star-making machine, set in celebrity-obsessed Weimar Berlin.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Originally published in 1931, Tergit's arch satire is an amusing but bleak morality tale about cultural philistinism. The novel's central theme is inflation: as the cost of goods meteorically rises in Weimar Berlin, so does the reputation of a schmaltzy singer named K sebier. Unprepossessing and "unbelievably kitschy," K sebier nonetheless becomes a sensation with his earnest renditions of folk songs and fatuous comic numbers. Tergit documents K sebier's rise and fall into irrelevance through the lens of Berlin's journalistic, high-society, and financial circles. Covering the performer are the urbane, old-school reporters at the Berliner Rundschau newspaper. When an obnoxious, energetic disrupter buys the paper, the staff is forced to lower their elevated style (and salaries) to please the new owner. Insouciant socialites sumptuously fete K sebier, "a child of the people," while the economy teeters on the brink of collapse. Bankers and developers team up on a poorly timed, poorly planned, and poorly executed construction project offering large apartments no one can afford and a new theater for K sebier no one will attend. 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.
