Oedipus at Stalingrad

Oedipus at Stalingrad is a rare and thrilling work - a comic novel that is both noble and outrageous, a masterwork of high literature that is also a discomfiting, deadly satire. Written in the early 1950s, when the memory of the terrible Battle of Stalingrad was still vivid, when Germans were priding themselves on their economic recovery and new acceptability, when the ethos that had permitted or even encouraged Nazi excesses was being conveniently forgotten, Oedipus at Stalingrad zeroes in on the inmost psychological drama - and duplicity - of Berlin's upper class just before the war. In the summer of 1938, young Traugott von Jassilkowski - son of worthy nobodies in East Prussia - embarks on a social career that, he fervently hopes, will take him to the heights of the German aristocracy. A cunningly devised wardrobe, a strategic courtship, important weekends with well-placed grandees, the right lunches and boozy evenings with Berlin's smart set: Will these carry him to the top? Or will these trivial pursuits land the would-be baron exactly nowhere?