A broadly flowing, painfully beautiful elegy about the life of our own time, filled with hopes, sufferings, and illusions. Three generations of a Rhineland architect family will gather on September 6, 1958, to celebrate the eightieth birthday of their patriarch. Heinrich Fähmel received the commission to build the Abbey of St. Anton in 1907. His son Robert—who plays billiards daily from half past nine to eleven at the Hotel Prinz Heinrich—destroyed this abbey as a demolition expert for the Wehrmacht during the last days of the war. The grandson Joseph will be involved in the reconstruction. In Robert's conversations with the hotel bellboy, in flashbacks and memories of his father, the past and present intertwine, and the situations of each time period become clear. The fundamental conflict that Böll addresses is symbolized.