In 1932, the Berlin-born writer Gabriele Tergit set out to memorialise what she saw as a disappearing world: the lives and fates of the city’s Jews. By 1945, after fleeing the Nazis first to Czechoslovakia, then Palestine, then Britain, Tergit had finished her novel, but it took until 1951 for The Effingers to be published. Even then, only a few German booksellers wanted it in their shops. It was too strange a piece of work for a German public that had watched, if not participated, in the Holocaust.
Though overlooked at the time, it has been rediscovered as a classic in Germany, and has now been published in English for the first time. It is a chronicle of three affluent Jewish families in Berlin between 1878 and 1942, with an epilogue set in 1948, based on Tergit’s return visit to her destroyed city. Tergit understood how dangerous the Nazis were. She was a court reporter and covered Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels on trial in the 1920s – this also made her a target, and she fled Berlin after narrowly escaping an SA (“Brownshirts”) raid in March 1933.
It is eerie, reading The Effingers in 2025, that the Nazis’ rise to power is something that happens largely on the periphery of the protagonists’ lives. There is a sense that while they recognise them as bad actors, they nevertheless feel themselves insulated from the Nazis in their extravagant villas in Tiergarten, with their good dresses and connections.
A similar atmosphere of overhanging political danger is apparent in Cabaret, the 1972 film based on the Berlin novels of Christopher Isherwood. The Weimar republic is portrayed as a hedonistic time, and the Nazis only emerge slowly from the background. One character even says: “The Nazis are just a gang of stupid hooligans – but they do serve a purpose: let them get rid of the communists and later we’ll be able to control them.” The sense of looming but underappreciated danger struck me as something contemporary.
Discourse on fascism is ubiquitous at the moment. Here in Germany it is being debated in articles, books, exhibitions and public lecture series. There are arguments about whether the politics of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) can be called fascism, or whether this 21st-century form of rightwing authoritarianism is qualitatively different.
In an attempt to better understand these historical precedents and our own times, I enrolled in an evening seminar on fascism entitled “Monsters” of Fascism Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, at the leftwing Berthold Brecht Literary Forum in Berlin. The central idea was, the lecturer explained, that being able to define fascism is the first step in increasing our resilience to it. Despite some challenges in determining a definition, we arrived at a few markers we could agree on: some attempt to create an ethnically “pure” nation, the engagement of a paramilitary force and use of excessive violence, anti-liberal and anti-democratic sentiments, and the involvement of wealthy backers from the economic elite.
When the discussion turned to the AfD, and where we might position them on the spectrum, a depressing air hung over the seminar room. We were moving from the theoretical realm to the political reality of Germany in 2025, and, while the AfD does not have its own paramilitary force or use excessive violence, there are reasonable concerns about the other criteria. This is a party for whom well over 30% of blue-collar workers and unemployed Germans voted in February’s federal elections. The AfD came in second overall nationally, winning 20.8% of the vote, with the CDU taking 28.5%. The latest polling has the AfD leading by 26% to the CDU’s 24%. The AfD is a party that has been deemed “rightwing extremist” by our own Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
One delusion from history that Germany’s establishment is in danger of repeating is the idea that the old elites can maintain control over newly emerging powers on the extreme right. A few weeks before the 2025 election, the Christian Democrat (CDU) chancellor, Friedrich Merz, broke the so-called firewall – the agreement among all democratic parties not to partner with the AfD in parliamentary votes. Merz got a proposal to crack down on illegal migration through parliament with the support of the AfD. Since then, several CDU members have called on Merz to end the firewall altogether.
When Germany commemorated the victims of the Nazi pogroms of November 1938 last month, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, our symbolic head of state, gave a speech in which he warned about the AfD in all but name. He called on Merz’s government to maintain the firewall, and even urged that legal options to ban anti-democratic political parties be considered. The prospect of banning the AfD has been debated extensively, but seems unlikely to happen; it also sidesteps tackling the roots of its support.
For people wanting to resist rightwing extremism, one of the first priorities is to show solidarity with those who are under threat. In Germany in 2025, this means mostly asylum seekers, specifically Syrians, Afghans and Ukrainians, but generally young men with migration histories. And there have been some public displays of such solidarity.
In January 2024, millions of people went out into the freezing streets across Germany to protest against the notorious secret “remigration” conference in Potsdam, attended by neo-Nazis and AfD members, and exposed by the investigative platform Correctiv. But neither this outrage nor concerns about the weakening parliamentary firewall seem to have made a lasting impact on Merz’s government.
The bitter moral lesson of Tergit’s novel comes in the final letter, written by the elder Effinger on the way to the concentration camp: “I believed in the good in people – that was the gravest error of my misguided life.” We shouldn’t stop believing in the good in people, but we should also heed the warnings of history. What The Effingers teaches us is not to underestimate the danger of the fascist menace, and to fight on all fronts against it, before it is no longer possible.