The years before the lights went out in Europe remain strangely underexplored. No German storyteller, except for Thomas Mann, has left us a great social novel that could make this rich, unsuspecting, and hard-to-grasp time tangible. It is not by chance that it is an emigrant, born in Berlin and raised between Germany, France, and England, who has filled this gap. Familiar with the atmosphere of the time before World War I, as well as with the Jewish bourgeoisie of Berlin and the Baden country nobility, Sybille Bedford creates a diorama of this distant world. She brilliantly combines elements of the Bildungsroman and the family saga with political reportage. Boom and ruin, anti-Semitism and cultural struggle, military madness and liberal upward mobility form the historical backdrop of the novel.