Even if Gabriele Tergit hadn’t been a good writer she’d be interesting to read just because of the times and places she found herself in. But she was, so it’s even better.
She wrote everything – short prose, long prose, straight journalism, not so straight journalism – as was common in the Twenties when she started, in Berlin especially. Tergit – actually Elise Reifenberg, née Hirschmann – started as a crime and trial reporter. She was influenced by Paul Schlesinger, who wrote under the name of “Sling”. (And if you find that as interesting as I apparently do: fasten your seatbelts, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.)
There are some people who are less and a whole lot who are even more forgotten than Tergit. There even is a Gabriele-Tergit-Promenade, somewhere in Tiergarten. Sometimes all it takes is a single person with enough enthusiasm (and savoir-faire I guess) to rescue a writer like that. Jens Brüning edited and published various anthologies of Tergit’s writing in the Eighties and Nineties, even though he was mostly a radio guy. He died two years ago.
I have this book “Wer schießt aus Liebe?” (Who Shoots For Love?), a collection of her pieces on crimes and mostly trials. Almost every piece could be a novel or a screenplay. They already seem to be great little short stories, even if they all just run two pages or so. There is a lot in them: ephemeral and everlasting, both because Tergit knew what she was writing about but not always what it meant.
So there is this piece “Alfred Döblin vor Gericht” (A.D. on trial). Great, I thought, maybe something about his practice as a neurologist. I love Döblin a whole lot – not just the Big One (though that as well) but more esoteric outings like his tetralogy about the Novemberrevolution 1918.
The reason Döblin was on trial in 1927 was something a bit more mundance, or maybe infinitely more imporant. He had had a bad experience with a dentist and written about him for an article in the Berliner Tageblatt. No name was given, of course, but the dentist in question felt that due to Döblin’s description of his apartment and practice “insiders” could very easily guess that he was the target. So he sued for libel.
A medical expert found no malpractice and that Döblin had no reason to complain about the dentist in the first place. Certainly not in print. Döblin’s lawyer said that his client produced a literary text – that Doctor X in the article is not Doctor X from real life, and that there could be no trial because “literary characters can’t sue”. Döblin was acquitted.
This is of course a wonderful story, not least because of its resonances. But Tergit is skeptical of the verdict. Because, she asks, didn’t Döblin want to be a chronicler, not a poet, in this case – to become the voice of all those with a toothache?