A prophetic lost classic from interwar Germany, following a group of Berliners on the skids as their nation begins to spin out of control.

Berlin in the early 1920s was the largest city in Europe, a cultural mecca, and a political mess. A hedonistic Babylon full of glitz, though there's little glamour for the hundreds of thousands out of work, the war-wounded, the prostitutes, and beggars. Come evening they, too, want to shed their cares at the Jolly Huntsman pub, where they gather to drink, dance, and celebrate life.

But there's always disaster lurking in the alleys and flophouses, a disaster that twenty-two-year-old Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz clearly saw coming. Here is the disarray and discontent that would feed the Nazi storm.

Tragically that storm would engulf the author, killed in 1942, one of many flames snuffed out by Germany's war machine. His literary debut from 1937, now translated into English for the first time, is both a testimony from that pivotal moment and the triumph of a spectacular talent.