The setting of the events is the old Austro-Hungarian Empire around the turn of the century. It is the time of the "fathers." There is order, no ideologies. Decency is expressed in the decor. Problems are taboo. Donald Clayton, the only son of an English machine manufacturer in Vienna, lives his "ordered" life alongside his father and seems to be connected to him like a brother. However, within that world, such brotherhood between father and son is deceptive: Where the father asserts his claim to life, the son perishes under the father. "The Waterfalls of Slunj" is the first "movement" of the (unfinished) "Novel No. 7" by Heimito von Doderer, structured after the model of a symphony in four movements, whose unity should lie solely in its formal elements. The second "movement" is titled "The Border Forest.".