Wellen (novel)

Set during a long hot summer in a small fishing village somewhere on the Baltic Sea, most likely on the Curonian Spit, it depicts a group of aristocratic city-dwellers spending their holidays in that remote part of the German Empire.

However, rather than painting a rural idyll, Keyserling focuses on the follies of a doomed fin de siècle society whose self-imposed repressions eventually lead to catastrophe.

Doralice, Countess of Köhne-Jasky, has walked out on her much older husband and run off with Hans Grill, a young artist who had been commissioned by the Count to paint his wife's picture.

One day, while swimming in the sea, Lolo meets Doralice on a sandbank and is deeply impressed by her cheerful manner, her wit, and her beauty, so much so that she decides to send her a huge bunch of red roses, while instinctively choosing her as her role model.

Lolo on the other hand, aware of her fiancé's infatuation, but due to an over-protective upbringing unprepared for life's harsh realities, decides to sacrifice herself by committing suicide.

At night she secretly leaves the house wearing only her bathing suit under her coat, walks down to the beach and starts swimming out into the sea, far beyond the sandbank where she met Doralice.

The old dilapidated one cannot defy the thunderstorm of which they have been warned, and the sea claims two more lives: After long days of waiting, Doralice and Mrs Steege finally accept the fact that their husbands are not coming back.

For example, in the film, the action is set on the eve of the First World War in order to stress the imminence of death of an aristocratic society and its antiquated social mores and conventions.