It is August 1967, and Gesine Cresspahl, born in Germany the year that Hitler came to power, a survivor of war, of Soviet occupation, and of East German Communism, has been living with her ten-year-old daughter, Marie, in New York City for six years. Now, with Marie growing up, Gesine has decided to tell her daughter the story of her own childhood in a small north German town in the 1930s and 1940s. Amidst memories of Germany's criminal and disastrous past and the daily barrage of news from a world in disarray, Gesine struggles to describe what she has learned over the years and what she hopes to pass on to Marie. Marie, articulate, quizzical, with a perspective that is very much her own, has plenty of questions too. Uwe Johnson's intimate portrait of a mother and daughter is also a panorama of past and present history and the world at large.