Vienna 1936, two years before the annexation of Austria to the German Reich. Leonidas, just turned 50, married to one of the richest heiresses in the country and himself head of a department in the Ministry of Education, finds a letter from his great love at the breakfast table - a Jewish woman who asks him for support for a talented young man who can no longer attend high school in Germany for well-known reasons. Werfel's powerful narrative is a psychological portrait of an opportunist and simultaneously a document of the latent to open anti-Semitism that permeates the society of the First Republic. Those who have not yet read it should do so now at the latest. Notes, an afterword, and a timeline by Guntram Zürn provide an entry into even deeper reading. The exquisite edition speaks for itself.