A late novel and a sequel to Radetzkymarsch, following Franz Ferdinand Trotta, a young Viennese man of the last generation of the old Austria. He drifts through an idle youth before the First World War, then is swept up in the war and its aftermath. Afterward he finds the world he knew gone and his family and country transformed. The book is a quiet, sorrowful reflection on loss, identity and the end of the Habsburg monarchy.