Ernst Augustin's debut novel "Der Kopf" (1962) is one of the major existentialist novels of the post-war period. Augustin received the Hermann Hesse Prize for it, and the public was astonished. The tone was new, it sounds like this: "Child of man, he thought, this is outrageous. He sat outside under the open sky, and only now was he overcome with emotion. Touching the grass." Before the catastrophe struck, Türmann had endured all premonitions. As a free thinker, he feared his own imagination: "If everything I see around me really springs from my own mind, then anything I think could happen." Consequently, Türmann envisions the greatest possible catastrophe, which promptly occurs in the first part of Ernst Augustin's novel. In the second part, "Der Keller," Augustin tells the story of the survivors. Asam was once a teacher. Now he fights.