In English for the first time a panoramic satire about the star-making machine set in
celebrity-obsessed Weimar Berlin. In Berlin 1930 the name Käsebier is on everyone's lips. A
literal combination of the German words for cheese and beer it's an unglamorous name for an
unglamorous man-a small-time crooner who performs nightly on a shabby stage for laborers
secretaries and shopkeepers. Until the press shows up. In the blink of an eye this everyman
is made a star: a star who can sing songs for a troubled time. Margot Weissmann the arts
patron hosts champagne breakfasts for Käsebier Muschler the banker builds a theater in his
honor Willi Frächter a parvenu writer makes a mint off Käsebier-themed business ventures and
books. All the while the journalists who catapulted Käsebier to fame watch the monstrous media
machine churn in amazement-and are aghast at the demons they have unleashed. In Käsebier Takes
Berlin the journalist Gabriele Tergit wrote a searing satire of the excesses and follies of
the Weimar Republic. Chronicling a country on the brink of fascism and a press on the edge of
collapse Tergit's novel caused a sensation when it was published in 1931. As witty as Kurt
Tucholsky and as trenchant as Karl Kraus Tergit portrays a world too entranced by fireworks to
notice its smoldering edges.
