The meeting—if that’s what it was—broke up, and with a sense of unreality, Marianne headed back to the party to resume her hostess responsibilities. Conversations rose and fell, the jazz trio played, and from the landing of the stairs someone recited Cicero in Latin.

But outside, beyond the castle walls, terrible things were happening. Marianne could imagine Hitler’s thuggish Brownshirts swarming the streets, swaggering and shouting with their air of unchecked violence. She had seen them marching in a parade last summer in Munich. Two of the men had broken formation and rushed toward her across the sidewalk. For a moment she had stood frozen, afraid that she would be attacked: but for what? Instead they knocked down the university student beside her and kicked him as he curled into a ball, their shiny black boots hammering at his back. It had happened so fast that she simply stood. Why? What did he do? she asked a man standing beside her when the SA were gone. He did not lift his hand in a proper Heil, the man whispered as they bent to help the poor student to his feet.

For days afterward she saw those men’s faces as they rushed at her: ordinary, middle-aged faces flattened and made stupid with violence.

“What is it? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Mimi Armacher said, interrupting the memory. Mimi was a sweet woman, a distant cousin of Albrecht’s whom Marianne had always liked.

“I’ve just heard—” Marianne faltered. What to call it? It was something from a less civilized time, and for which she had no vocabulary. “We’ve gotten news from Munich that there is rioting—the SA—beating people, breaking down Jewish properties—”

“News?” Mimi repeated, as if this were the incomprehensible thing.

“From a friend of Connie’s who’s just arrived,” Marianne explained.

“Oh, how awful,” Mimi said, and her face fell. “In all the cities?”

Others gathered around. Marianne was aware of Berna and Gottlieb Bruckner at the edge of the group, and Alfred Klausner: Jewish friends whose own positions here in Germany were increasingly difficult. Generations of assimilation no longer seemed to set them apart from the eastern immigrant Jews Hitler was obsessed with deporting. No one was safe.

Marianne felt exhausted suddenly. “That’s what I understood.”

“Destroying property?” someone asked. “At random?”

“Jewish property,” Mimi asserted with chilling crispness. “Only Jewish properties.” She turned to Marianne. “Isn’t that what you said?”

Marianne stared at her. “I don’t know.” She drew herself up. “Does it matter? Our government is unleashing bands of thugs.”

“It is the beginning of the end,” the countess pronounced dramatically when she heard of the destruction that would later be referred to as Kristallnacht. “That Austrian will ruin this country.”

With that, she went up to bed.

Marianne envied her freedom. She herself would have to shepherd this party to its bitter end.

As the news spread, guests with government roles or substantial properties in nearby cities took off down the hill, speeding drunkenly around curves, honking and flashing their headlights. They were followed, more soberly, by the few Jewish guests. A few voyeuristic idiots drove to the neighboring town of Ehrenheim to see how far the rioting had spread.