Five decades after war’s end, a rare-books dealer receives a strange visitor

The guns went silent on November 11, 1918, never to fire again. Throughout the 1920s, unrest seethed across Europe, and Fascists battled Communists in the streets of Berlin, but democracy won out. For years, peace has prevailed around the world. But there is a part of Franklin Altman that misses the war.

A rare-books dealer living in New York City, Altman has devoted his life to studying the history of the Weimar Republic, when all of Europe hung in the balance and it seemed it would take but a single spark to set the world ablaze. Why did that spark never come?

Altman is musing on these questions one evening when a man comes into his shop. An aged German veteran with a limp and the faint shakes of Parkinson’s, he is about to teach Altman that in history, the devil is in the details.