In the former GDR, this book circulated in several tens of thousands of copies before it was first published in the Federal Republic in the mid-seventies - thirty years after the completion of the manuscript, "on the seventeenth after D-Day," the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944. As contraband, the edition from Aufbau-Verlag was, of course, also known in the West, especially since the East German literary scholar Walter Dietze considered Heinrich Mann's writings from 1941 to 1944 to be among the most significant autobiographies of our century. Autobiography is, of course, an inadequate designation. In his memoir "An Era is Observed," Heinrich Mann reaches far beyond his own lifetime. He spans the arc from the French Enlightenment, during which he might have liked to live himself, to the end of World War II.