The book follows two Jewish families in Berlin from the 1870s to the 1940s. Paul Effinger moves to Berlin and, with his brother Karl, founds a company manufacturing nails. Paul is serious and hard-working, Karl is more worldly.
The first half of the novel concerns the growth of the company into a major car manufacturer and the brothers’ marriages into the Oppner banking family in the years leading up to the outbreak of WWI. We get a strong sense of the society in which the families move, with many parties and dinners. And, aside from Waldemar Goldschmitt’s exclusion from a professorship at the University of Berlin, the antisemitism of this society remains in the background.
The war is compellingly evoked in various vignettes, but it is the after-war period where the narrative begins to pick up speed and the narrative form itself becomes more fractured as we follow the next generation – Lotte, Erwin, Marianne, James, and Harold – through the post-war settlement, reparations and hyper-inflation, to the rise of Hitler and the consolidation of nazi power
5/5
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