Brilliantly erotic and obsessive - a spellbinding love story.
Just a moment ago, Alois Pokora was fighting in the World War. Then he wakes up in hospital in Berlin - and the world is a different place. It’s the year 1918, the Kaiser has fled, the old order is crumbling. The miner's son Alois, the first in the family to receive an education, longs for his love Agnes - but soon allows himself to be seized by the maelstrom of new freedom, spiritual, revolutionary, even erotic. He gets involved in the Berlin demi-monde, trains a fighting force for the dubious "Baroness", meets Rosa Luxemburg. After a shoot-out with the loyal to the Kaiser around the Berlin castle, he just manages to escape home to enchanted Silesia. Where everything has also changed. Unexpectedly, Alois has to face his own roots - and finally comes face to face with Agnes. But Alois is caught between all fronts.
Szczepan Twardoch gives a powerful, worldly portrayal of the world war and of subversive Berlin with its broken, beaten and party-loving survivors, the upheavals that soon engulf the whole of Europe. Demut is a forceful novel about a man caught in the maelstrom of the times, caught between emancipation and self-doubt, seeking his way in an explosive, tremendously free epoch.
"Twardoch is a kind of Tarantino of historical narrative." FAZ
„Rough and nasty, historical and brutal: Twardoch writes historical novels in such a way that they sweep you into the present ...
In addition, a Berlin novel with coolness and fatal passion.“ Die Zeit
