Introduction

Summary

SOMETIME DURING AUTUMN 1932, Claire Bergmann's novel, Was wird aus deinen Kindern, Pitt? appeared in German bookstores. It is fair to say that it enjoyed an immediate, mostly positive critical reception. It is also fair to say that it has fallen into almost complete obscurity. As we will soon see, this work chronicles the travails of the Deutsch family from its rise in the 1890s until the summer of 1932. At the onset, the central character is Pitt Deutsch, a traditional conservative, and, as his name implies, a kind of German Everyman. Loyal to the Kaiser, Deutsch rises from skilled worker to wartime millionaire, and then loses everything in the postwar hyperinflation. The rest of the book is set in 1932 (mostly in Berlin) and switches its focus to the Deutsch children. Two are out-of-work academics. Two are Nazis. Two are secretaries and one is a “kept woman.” Among the book's subplots and themes are a German-Jewish romance, the appearance and trials of the “New Woman,” the psychological costs of unemployment, Nazi-Communist street violence, Nazi harassment of Jews, and abortion. It also makes reference to the year's many national elections, the Lausanne Conference, and other contemporary political events. The quickening politics of the late Weimar Republic and the Nazi accession to power overtook the book's contemporary message, and its relevance waned, until the work resurfaced, in a sense, when it appeared on the 1938 Liste des schädlichen und unerwünschten Schrifttums, the list of books banned in Germany during the Third Reich.

My discovery of this book was a happy accident. I was reading a microfilmed edition of the Vossische Zeitung, one of Weimar Berlin's newspapers of record, for a long-term research project when I stumbled across a review of the work by Hans Fallada. For some reason, perhaps because I admire Fallada's classic novel, Kleiner Mann, was nun? (What Now, Little Man?), I read and was fascinated by his praise for a novel about then current events, and made a note of it for later reading. Imagine my surprise when, according to WorldCat, fewer than a dozen libraries in the world had this book.