The Breaking of the Storm

Written in the feverish years after German unification, this sprawling social novel takes the speculative boom of the 1870s as its subject: the sudden fortunes, reckless investment, and moral rot that followed the founding of the new empire. Spielhagen sets private ambition and family loyalty against the machinery of Berlin finance, gathering engineers, aristocrats, and speculators around a story that weighs honest work against paper wealth. A literal storm-tide breaking on the Baltic coast gives the book its title and its warning, standing in for the crash the author sees coming. Long a fixture of nineteenth-century German realism, it captures a society intoxicated by its own new power. S.E.A.H. Stephenson's English translation is offered here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.