Fasching

Berlin, winter 1919: confetti still clings to the boots of defeated soldiers, but inside the Spiegelpalast the brass band blares as if the world never stopped turning. Lya Mara, porcelain-boned and eyes like cracked sapphires, sweeps through the carnival throng in a harlequin cape stitched from silk and lies. She is the fleeing bride of Heinrich Peer’s cuckolded industrial heir, a man who has traded his field-artillery lungs for a velvet collar and the delusion that money can still purchase devotion. Mabel May-Yong glides beside her as the Andalusian dancer whose wrist-flicks contain whole epics of exile; she is both conspirator and mirror, reflecting Mara’s restlessness in sepia tones. Ernst Hofmann’s war-scarred portraitist stalks the periphery with sketchbook and opium tin, convinced that capturing a face will ransom his own soul, while Fritz Schulz, a Jewish joke-writer-turned-impresario, stages cabaret numbers that turn anti-Semitic taunts into staccato revenge. Over five fevered nights the masquerade becomes a tribunal: identities swapped like playing-cards, marriages wagered against roulette spins, a child conceived in a confessional booth and immediately bartered for forged passports. When the final trumpet sounds at dawn on Rose Monday, the survivors—some in police vans, some in lovers’ arms—stumble out into the Tiergarten to discover that the snow has turned the color of diluted wine, and every footprint is already being filled by the next waltz.