The Austrian writer Joseph Roth's first novel, 'Das Spinnennetz', 1923, intensely chronicles the development of a fascist and the first steps in his rise to power. It is a vivid portrait of the nationalist fervor and the struggle between Right and Left in Germany during the years immediately following the end of the Great War, or First World War. Two days after its serial publication in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung ('The Worker'), Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff set in motion the Munich 'Beer Hall Putsch'. 'The Spiderweb' - here translated by the narrator - is a prophetic look into the political machinery that was to force its author into exile in France ten years later, where he died in 1939 at the age of 45.