In this novel, Joseph Roth, with his dry and precise style, often compared to that of Stendhal, offers the reader a disillusioned and insightful panorama of Central Europe, spanning from the early 20th century to the economic disaster of 1929, through the First World War.
Pablo Bernheim, the son of a small banker, is an arrogant young man eager for power and determined to stand out in every field. He studies at Oxford and is later forced to take charge of the family bank, a business he knows little about, but the war intervenes to offer him a different role. Assigned to military administration, a job that does not align with his ambitions, he proves to be an incorruptible official, though he is anti-war. He maintains connections with pacifists and secret societies, and writes for revolutionary newspapers.
An incident forces him to request a posting to the front, but a wound keeps him in the rear. When the war ends and the Republic is proclaimed, he returns to the bank, which is in serious trouble during the rampant inflation of the postwar period. A conflict with his brother, Teodoro, a member of the nationalist, anti-Semitic organization "God and Iron," who is forced to flee the country, ties Pablo to a mysterious Ukrainian figure of Jewish origin, Nikolai Brandeis. Using his financial acumen, Brandeis manages to build a solid economic empire amidst the widespread financial collapse in the country.
The twists and turns in Pablo Bernheim's life, set against the backdrop of the political, social, and economic upheavals of the time, also reflect in some ways the life of Roth himself during the period described.