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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
5\/5<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-books"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions\/20"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}