Das Irrlicht im Osten

East Prussia, winter 1919: in a manor half-devoured by frost, the scion Ludwig Herold returns from invisible battlefields clutching not a rifle but a lantern of guilt; its flame, a phosphorescent will-o’-the-wisp, dances across the corridors where cousin Mary Mahr—once his childhood co-conspirator—now rehearses a marriage to provincial timber-baron Benny Haby, a man whose moustache is as stiff as the tariffs he exacts from every falling log. Into this brittle betrothal floats cabaret sphinx Dely Delys, trailing rumours of Berlin cocaine and Petrograd diamonds, her cigarette tips spelling secrets in Morse that only Herold’s haunted pupils decode. Between parlour and barn, the estate’s servants—Viktoria Pohl-Meiser’s tight-lipped housekeeper, Willy Godlewski’s one-eyed valet—stage their own shadow-theatre, passing love-letters inside warming pans and rifle-oil inside hymnals. When the river Vistula cracks its icy corset, a mutilated corpse surfaces wearing Herold’s regimental badge; suddenly the ghost-light is not metaphor but manhunt. Mahr must decide whether to rescue the beloved cousin who once braided her hair with marsh-grass or the fiancé who promises escape from crumbling dynasties. Over three nights of sleet and Strauss waltzes, marriages combust, wills oxidise, and the Irrlicht itself—part folklore, part spy-code—reveals a final identity no folklore prepared them for: a woman scorned twice, disguised as fate.