World War I

World War I is presented as the force that carries an empire away and scatters the history of a valuable diamond. Rather than narrating the war as a sequence of battles, the novel traces its consequences through exile, failed recovery, and an increasingly uncertain trail of reports about the missing jewel.

Imperial Collapse and the Lost Diamond

As the empire faces defeat, the diamond is placed with other treasures in Switzerland for safekeeping. The measure protects the jewel from the immediate crisis but also removes it from the family’s reach: the exiled imperial household, living in Madeira, tries in vain to retrieve it. After Charles dies prematurely in 1922, his widow Zita, already a mother of five, is likewise unable to find the diamond. The wartime rupture thus persists beyond the end of the conflict as a private inheritance that cannot be reclaimed.

A Disappearing Trail

The account marks the point at which the jewel’s whereabouts become unknown: after its transfer to Switzerland, its trace is lost. The family’s unsuccessful attempts to recover it leave a gap that later stories fill without resolving. The novel presents that gap as the beginning of an accumulating legend, not as proof that any particular explanation is true.

Rumor and the Afterlife of the War

Later accounts claim that Hitler sought the diamond because an astrologer had predicted that it would make him master of Europe. The story further alleges that, after the Nazi coup in Vienna in 1937, he had the remaining imperial treasure searched. These claims are presented as circulating tales, alongside the efforts of diamond magnates Williamson, associated with the Tanganyika mines, and Oppenheimer, head of De Beers, to trace the missing jewel. By setting uncertain later reports against the concrete facts of exile, failed recovery, and the loss of the trail, the novel makes the diamond a vessel for the empire’s unresolved aftermath.