Der große Unbekannte

In a labyrinthine Berlin where gas-lamps hiss like serpents and every cobblestone seems to sweat dread, the city itself becomes an omniscient conspirator: a nameless phantom—part gentleman-swindler, part urban legend—glides through smoky dance-halls, anarchist cellars and mahogany-panelled dens, leaving behind only a calling card inked with an unpronounceable sigil. A war-scarred inspector, eyelids twitching from morphine and shell-shock, stalks this uncatchable quarry; his only leads are a cabaret chanteuse whose voice can fracture mirrors, a one-armed locksmith who speaks to locks as if they were confidants, and a syphilitic aristocrat who trades state secrets for absinthe. Each midnight pursuit folds inward like a paper theatre, revealing trapdoors within trapdoors: a vanished heir, a forged Titian, a railway shares swindle that topples a ministry, and finally a séance in a condemned aquarium where the living and the dead bid for a ledger that contains every soul Berlin has ever sold. When the gilded cage of identity finally clangs shut, the fugitive’s face dissolves into a thousand wanted posters, suggesting that the ‘great unknown’ is less a man than a collective nightmare wearing evening dress.