The Black Obelisk

In 1923 Ludwig Bodmer, a veteran of the First World War, works for a monument company in a German town where prices rise faster than wages and grief has become a commercial business. He sells gravestones, plays music at a veterans’ club and watches ordinary transactions become absurd under hyperinflation.

Ludwig’s conversations with Isabelle, a patient in a psychiatric institution, deepen his search for meaning beyond money and post-war disillusionment. Around them, nationalist violence and resentment are becoming politically organised, allowing the novel to connect private uncertainty with the instability of Weimar Germany and the early growth of Nazism.