Wharton (Edith) The Descent of Man

A Drama of Divided Germany
London, Macmillan, 1932.

First UK edition. 8vo. Original yellow cloth. Dust-jacket, clipped to front inside flap but with stamped price $2.00 present, possibly for export.

A political novel set amid the turmoil of late Weimar Germany, portraying a society destabilised by economic collapse, ideological extremism, and the erosion of democratic institutions. Its protagonist, a schoolteacher who persuades himself he can remain apolitical, is drawn into a world squeezed between "Hitlerites, Agrarians, and Communists." Written from a broadly left-democratic perspective, the novel captures the febrile atmosphere of the early 1930s; the original German edition appeared in 1932.The author Frank, an Austrian-born writer, journalist, and screenwriter would later be associated with films produced during the Nazi period, including Reitet für Deutschland, a commercially successful work endorsed by the regime and subsequently banned by the Allies in 1945.