It’s Sunday the 14th of October, 1888, and in the city of Vienna, where the value of one’s bank account is more important than that of a human life, something doesn’t seem to add up…

Such is the case for the failed psychologist Gottfried Todenhöfer, the gifted philosopher Carolina Romanova, the world-weary mercenary Rocco Romano, and the colorful musician Vincent Fontaine, who all become the unwilling participants to the scheme of the century. As the lives of these seemingly unrelated people are woven together, they discover a powerful secret that has been set in motion by a most mysterious, clandestine regime.  For reasons of their own, Gottfried, Carolina, Rocco and Vincent dig deeper into the case and happen upon evidence surrounding far-reaching monetary reforms.

All their lives, however, take a violent turn when they find out a deeper phenomenon is at play, a way of pulling the strings that not only forms the basis of the regime’s power but hits the very essence of morality, affecting every aspect of Viennese life. A secret so well beholden, the regime is willing to murder for it.

Amidst plots and counterplots, tragedy, deceit, betrayal, revenge, guilt, bad conscience, and deep internal divisions, the fate of Gottfried, Carolina, Rocco, and Vincent hang in the balance of paying off the greatest debt. Forced to re-evaluate the very foundation of their moral understanding, they have to do the thing they are most reluctant in doing: to wage an all-out war against this regime, possibly at the cost of their own.

Protagonists

Antagonists

In the greatest debt, the characters are placed at odds with forces from an all-powerful, all-corrupt financial system. Having been dropped into the middle of far-reaching monetary reforms, the reader – through a first-person perspective - will experience the same sense of overwhelming hopelessness and injustice as the protagonists. This is the story of their struggle against a clandestine empire that turns morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic and their cause to right the wrongs.

The greatest debt is set in 1888 in Vienna, during the Belle Époque in continental Europe. A golden age in which Fin-de-siècle Vienna flowered and a year in which the streets of Vienna were absolutely paved with culture. As one of the first truly multi-ethnic cities, Vienna became a place of uncommon cultural and intellectual productivity, radically departing from artistic tradition and unabashed in its exploration of themes such as sexuality. From the modernist movement in art and architecture to the Viennese Secessionist school in painting and the twelve-tone system in music and from psychoanalysis to intentionality and the Austrian school of economics, Vienna seemed to have it all. But it was also a period of serious social and political tensions. Tensions that gave voice to a most rabid anti-Semitism. And precisely the kind of tensions that provide the stage for an epic story.

The central theme of this novel is about the very assumption that one has to pay one’s debts, a strangely powerful concept that is not only economic but also moral and philosophical in nature. The protagonists in this story are told that they ought to give people their dues, fulfil their obligations to others, and never renege on their promises. But what if the very essence of their moral understanding turns out to be false. What if their understanding of morality is the result of a powerful financial scheme? What if their sense of morality and justice is defined by the language of this business deal? What if they just accept the justice of this arrangement because nobody really understands what the scheme is.