In 1948, on her first journey from exile in London to Berlin, Gabriele Tergit also met Erik Reger, co-publisher and editor-in-chief of the Tagesspiegel. “We had published our first novels with Ernst Rowohlt at the same time, he ‘Union der Feste Hand’, I ‘Käsebier’. I met a somber person.” Reger “looked starving,” she recalled.
In 1931, Reger’s novel caused a stir similar to that of Tergit’s as it dealt with the present day. Both novels were ‘rediscovered’ several times after 1945, without much response. While Tergit’s novel is finally causing a sensation in the latest new edition, Reger’s novel is yet to achieve a similar success. As with Tergit, Schöffling now relies on this with a new edition. Tergit and Reger and their novels are antipodes in the same field.
Both journalists by training, who wrote under pseudonyms, dealt in their novels with “business”, with mood and opinion-making. Tergit: “organization of talk”. Reger: “Rule of phrases”. Both can be read as complementary to each other: while Tergit focuses on Berlin’s cultural scene, Reger focuses on the heavy industrial economy of the Ruhr area and its instrumentalization of politics and the public. Tergit concentrates on one year, Reger covers the period from 1918 to 1930. Tergit’s novel is characterized by feuilletonistic wit and brash irony, Reger’s by reportage-like, analytical sobriety and occasionally a sarcastic touch of ice.
And it’s a man’s world that he’s literally dissecting. He had subtitled his second novel, The Watchful Chicken, from 1932, “Vivisection of Reality”. This also characterizes the first. Today it is unanimously considered the most important German industrial novel of the 20th century. It could also be read as a war novel of the interwar period. His chapter headings: surprise, consternation, conversion, collection, fortification. A report from the Generalanzeiger follows each chapter in the chronology of the history of the district, from the end of the war and the workers’ uprising to the occupation of the Ruhr and relative consolidation to the economic crisis.
At the end of the last chapter, according to Reger in the preceding “instructions for use”, the attentive reader should be able to write the report himself. This alone is an indication that it is about more than just heavy industrial development, namely about the attempts by industrial leaders to manipulate politics and the public in their interests. This happens in a variety of ways, internally through the care of the ‘work community’ and through company newspapers, externally through purchased university lecturers or opinion leaders à la Oswald Spengler, but above all, in addition to the corruption of the communist and social democratic trade unionists and works councils, through the pampering of the Nazis , which one considers more or less idiots, but useful for one’s own interests.
From the further course of history this has been read as a clairvoyant warning of the coming Nazi rule. And at the same time Reger published a really clairvoyant series on the “Natural History of National Socialism” in the “Vossische Zeitung”. Accordingly, the chapter yet to be written should have been entitled ‘Attack’. In view of Reger’s skepticism based on natural history, however, one could also deduce an idea of cyclic regression from this.
When the novel, only slightly edited, was reprinted in 1946 by Aufbau, this was under the sign of anti-fascist criticism of capitalism in West German heavy industry. However, since Reger has meanwhile sharply attacked the SED policy from the “Tagesspiegel”, Wolfgang Harich, as the initiator of the new edition, came under heavy criticism. But if you read the novel again from today, the Ruhr area of yore appears as a place of sooty chimneys.
The ‘weapon forge of the Reich’, the rule of the industrial barons, the futile rebellion of the workers, the mixture of economic supremacy and cultural provincialism, the political struggles from left and right, the Nazis’ fatal attempts at instrumentalization by the industrial leaders, the hushed, gray everyday life – as that is deep past and museum today. But that doesn’t make Reger’s novel a historical novel. At its core, it negotiates something similar to Tergit, only from a different perspective. That was obvious in Reger’s career.
Born as Hermann Dannenberger in 1898 in the Rhineland, after the war and imprisonment he came to Essen to work in the Krupp press office. That’s how he got his insights. Which he then deepened as a freelance journalist. If you read the novel from its perspective of criticism of the general opinion and the interested opinion-makers, then it is extremely topical – and exciting. Because the more than 600 pages show an example of a system of collective self-deception based on opportunism, egoism and laziness in thinking. Reger called it “rule of the phrase”. Decades later, Hans Magnus Enzensberger spoke of the “consciousness industry”. But anyone who thinks that Reger’s novel is a historical exposure of the “lying press” and the evil conspiracies is mistaken.
Because if there’s one thing you can learn from the novel, it’s that the all-powerful masterminds don’t exist any more than the powerful manipulative media. That the ideas about it belong to the system of self-deception, a system in which everyone believes they can instrumentalize the other, in which backwardness and illusions about the future play the ball, small self-deception goes hand in hand with large-scale attempts at manipulation.
Erik Reger: Union of the firm hand. novel of a development. With an afterword by Andreas Rossmann. Schöffling