Right and Left

Berlin, the late 1920s. The inflation has eaten the Bernheim fortune. The nightclubs are full. The Republic is holding, more or less. And on the streets, the paramilitary organizations are growing.

Paul Bernheim has returned from the war to find himself heir to a bank he doesn't understand, in a world he can't quite navigate. He is charming, educated, and entirely without direction - a man of the middle in every sense, caught between his German father's world and his Jewish mother's, between ambition and inertia, between a social order that is dissolving and whatever is coming to replace it.

His younger brother Theodor has found an answer. It is not a good one.

Into Paul's life comes Nikolai Brandeis - a Russian émigré of mysterious origins who has built a commercial empire in Weimar Berlin through methods nobody examines too carefully. He offers Paul an arrangement. The arrangement will prove, in ways Paul does not anticipate, to be a mirror of everything wrong with the world he lives in.

Published in 1929 - the year of the Wall Street Crash, four years before Hitler's rise to power - Right and Left is Joseph Roth's most politically acute novel, a portrait of Weimar Germany so precisely observed that it reads now as an act of prophecy. By the author of The Radetzky March.