Das Milliardentestament

A dying steel baron, his lungs choked with soot and regret, bequeaths not an empire but a booby-trapped moral labyrinth: every pfennig of his gilded fortune will drop into the laps of three heirs only if they prove, within a single year, that they can squander it more catastrophically than he hoarded it. Thus the Berlin nights become a feverish carousel of champagne that tastes of rust, roulette wheels clacking like loosened teeth, burlesque revues whose spotlights scorch the dancers’ wings into moth-dust. Albert Steinrück’s patriarch, half-corpse and half-puppetmaster, watches from lacquered death-chambers while his nephew, a sybaritic poet with ink in his veins and absinthe on his breath, buys a bankrupt circus and forces lions to waltz with debutantes; the widowed daughter-in-law, satin sliding from collarbones sharp enough to slice trust funds, bankrolls a doomed oceanic expedition in search of a mermaid said to weep real pearls; the black-sheep grandson, a scarred veteran whose pupils still flare with trench-flares, converts a Gothic cathedral into a speakeasy where Communists and counts share cocaine communion. As Reichsmarks burn like magnesium, the city itself mutates: department-store manneins begin moving two beats ahead of their human twins, Tiergarten statues sweat plaster tears, and the Spree runs milky with photographic fixer, as if the whole metropolis were a negative waiting for the right acid bath. When the final ledger is tallied, the heirs discover that ruin, like mercury, slips through gloved fingers; the dead man’s joke is that entropy cannot be purchased—only revealed. The last reel freezes on a close-up of a child’s porcelain bank, cracked open to reveal not coins but a single human molar, a laconic epitaph for a century already chewing on its own marrow.