Berlin Family Chronicles: Gabriele Tergit’s Exile Novel 'Effingers' (The 2025 Naish Lecture)

Speaker: Anna Weber (London)


The German-Jewish writer Gabriele Tergit (1896–1982) has emerged as one of the major rediscoveries in German literature during the last decade. Having built an impressive career as one of the few female court reporters in the Weimar Republic, Tergit fled Berlin early in March 1933. After five years in Czechoslovakia and Mandate Palestine, she settled in London in 1938, spending the second half of her adult life here – first in emigrant circles in Hampstead, then in Putney. Given the forthcoming first English translation of her novel Effingers (1951), Anna Weber introduces Tergit as an important female voice that helps redress the still prevalent predominance of male authors in German exile literature. Written in thirty-five furnished rooms during Tergit’s search for permanent refuge, and completed in London, Effingers chronicles three generations of a German-Jewish family in Berlin, memorialising their way of life. Weber contextualises Effingers with her archive research on Tergit’s unpublished ‘Book on England’, which she wrote during the same period and which offers a revealing cultural commentary on her early experiences as a refugee in the UK, so painting a picture of this fascinating transnational writer whose work bridges German and British culture.

Anna Weber holds an M.St. from Oxford University, and is currently registered as a PhD student at King’s College London and the University of Stuttgart, where she taught for two years. She is also the holder of a Research Fellowship at the Leo Baeck Institute, London. 

All are welcome to attend this in person lecture at the University of London Senate House. Entry is free, but advance online registration is essential. Refreshments available from 15:30.

Image: Detail from Lesser Ury, Frau am Schreibtisch,1898(Wikimedia Commons/public domain).