Hermann Kapp-Dortmunder is born a bastard and a musical genius amid the grim realities of Central Europe between the two World Wars. Variations on the Beast chronicles the perverse parallel of his rise to the peak of the musical world while the Weimar Republic collapses into the brutality of Nazism. As the twisted episodes of his life unfold, the novel's scope expands to include historical figures such as Goebbels, Göring, Herbert von Karajan, and the composer Richard Strauss, as art and fascism wrestle with each other in a world going mad.