The new publishing director cleans up. The venerable Berliner Rundschau gets a colorful supplement with cosmetics, a tabloid specialist is enticed away by a gossip sheet for a lot of money. In the editorial department, every fifth employee is made redundant, the rest get less salary. And of course the boss also wants to introduce open-plan offices.
When this managing director, an energetic dabbler and zeitgeist opportunist, finally switches to the competition, the Berliner Rundschau ruined and the feature editor Miermann is unemployed. “He had the breadth of the epic poet and the baldness of the humorist,” writes Gabriele Tergit about him. It is only when he is thrown out that Miermann realizes that he has been fooling himself all these years: he thought he was some kind of artist, but he was only an interchangeable, poorly paid employee.
What sounds like a satire on a panic relaunch in today’s troubled newspaper industry is set in Berlin around 1930. We owe our acquaintance with the manners and customs of Berlin cultural journalism of the late Weimar Republic to Gabriele Tergit’s novel “Käsebier conquers the Kurfürstendamm”. .
With the rediscovery of Tergit and her large family novel, “Die Effingers”, written in exile, her “Käsebier” novel debut from 1931 has also come into focus again. It’s a classic of what the Nazis hated as “asphalt fiction” – urban, fast-paced, funny and clairvoyant. Now Katharina Thalbach is reading a text version of the big city novel skilfully shortened to two hours by Sibylle Baschung at the Berliner Ensemble, and you listen to this queen of the harsh Berlin dialect quite fascinated and amused as she dives into the babble of voices of the characters with relish.
There are the weary sighs of the theater critic (“Oh, I didn’t really do well with the article, I’ll order a schnapps”). There are the typesetter’s broad proletarian tones, unimpressed by anything in principle (“The feuilleton is again much too long, as always”). There is the old-fashioned smugness of a great writer who is very fascinated by himself, the boastful tones of the dynamic managing director and of course the melancholy of the always harried, always overworked editor Miermann, who hopes in vain for a little erotic affair after work.
Everyone is looking for sex here: “In 1929 it’s silly not to have a relationship.”
Of course, Thalbach takes great pleasure in savoring the sexual insinuations, sometimes with a slowly shoved finger in his mouth, sometimes with a coquettish sigh or rather futile self-consuming, or simply with a factual statement: “It’s 1929, and it’s 1929 it’s silly not to have a relationship.”
Tergit’s novel shows a kaleidoscope of new types of women, from the sexually offensive gymnastics teacher to the editor with a PhD, who is intellectually superior to the rest of the editorial team and then still falls for the philandering Paris correspondents. Thalbach uses Tergit’s type comedy for brief portraits of her characters. The fact that the reading develops such a nice pull is also due to the fact that dialogue is Tergit’s strength. She draws her characters through their diction and sociolects – a novel made to be transformed into a theater of voices by a great actress.
Of course, not only the brisk publishing manager is a con man who lives on empty promises. The history of the brief hype surrounding the Volkssänger Käsebier, the quick flirts, the headline machine in the press, the entertainment business craving for innovation, the bursting of real estate speculation, the whole city is one big bluff. The fact that not only financial values crumble in inflation, that all certainties and self-assurances have become quite porous and everyone still acts as if they have their lives under control is both funny and sad at the same time. Both, the comedy and the forlornness of the declassed citizens, Thalbach gives her completely unsentimental curiosity.
Flirt with the audience without pandering – Thalbach can do that
For her journey through time to the more broken than lively Babylon Berlin of the 1930s, Thalbach needs nothing more than a stage and contemporary office equipment: desk, stack of paper, filing cabinet, telephone. She changes from the relaxed narrator’s voice to the staccato of the big city snapshots from the overcrowded fun bars, then it goes into narrow backyards and quiet cafés for couples in love.
She always seems to marvel at the hyperactive characters rushing through their days (and even faster through the nights), to whom she lends her voice with many dialect variations and tones. Thalbach amuses himself with them, not at them, which is a big difference. The actress and voice actress flirts with the audience in the sold-out theater without currying favor with them for a second – great art.
When reading the novel, the constant excitement and the punch line thunderstorm of the rapid-fire dialogue can sometimes seem a bit tiring, but Thalbach plays with it virtuosically and casually. You listen to her and you are very close to the clever and the failed, to the bluffers, bankrupts, crash virtuosos and occasional romantics. There is no help for an audio book publisher who misses out on this.