The Progressionists, and Angela.

In the world of German politics, progress is just another word for plunder. Seraphin Gerlach, a wealthy and morally upright landholder, arrives at the Greifmann household expecting pleasant company, but finds instead a viper's nest of cynical ambition. Carl Greifmann, the ambitious banker, speaks of elections with contemptuous clarity: Hans Shund, a disreputable usurer, will become mayor, not despite his corruption but because of it. The mechanism is simple: bribery, manipulation, and the brittle vanity of voters who mistake opportunism for ideology. Into this moral swamp steps Seraphin, whose innocence is not naivety but a stubborn refusal to compromise. He is captivated by Louise Greifmann, whose beauty seems almost too pure for the rot surrounding her brother, and whose fate becomes tangled with the coming election. The novel, written by a Catholic prelate, does not offer easy redemption or clean triumph. Instead, it maps the precise anatomy of how decent people justify their silence while the machinery of deception grinds forward. It is a dark, clear-eyed portrait of a society eating itself, told with the moral urgency of a man who still believes integrity might matter.