The Border Forest was conceived by Heimito von Doderer as the second movement of the novel No. 7, structured after the model of a symphony in four movements. The unity of this four-part work is intended to lie not in its content, but solely in its formal elements. As in the first movement, the Waterfalls of Slunj, a character largely takes center stage. This is Lieutenant Zienhammer, an average person with a fate that is as relevant in all wars as in the one Heimito von Doderer depicts. Standing alongside Zienhammer is the doctor Dr. Alfons Halfon, who is in conflict with his father and searching for the strange circumstances surrounding his mother's death. Although The Border Forest remains a fragment, Doderer's technique of allowing things to act as themselves is already transparent; and the space created by the motif of the Border Forest.