Der Lumpenbaron

Summary

A tattered emperor of Vienna’s back-alley kingdom swaggers out of the Prater’s shadowed arches, his topcoat stitched from discarded theatre-velvet and seraphic guilt; beneath the flicker of gas-lamps he barters in human residue—orphans, secrets, syphilitic love letters—until a single shard of mirror, passed hand-to-hand like a secular Host, reflects the face he thought he’d pawned away. The city answers with carnival drums, a danse macabre of pawnshop dukes and tangoing countesses, all spiralling toward the frozen Danube where the self-crowned rag-baron must wager his last bolt of crimson cloth against the dawn.

Synopsis