I stood by the stairs to the platform and thought: blonde, twenty years old, coming to the city to become a teacher. Walter Fendrich, who aimlessly and on short notice tried his hand as a bank apprentice, salesman, and carpenter apprentice in the post-war period, receives a letter from his father one day asking him to pick up the daughter of a colleague from the train station. The encounter with the twenty-year-old Hedwig, whom he had last seen only fleetingly as a child, becomes a fateful meeting for Walter. Heinrich Böll masterfully brings to life the small-bourgeois settings, the atmosphere of the hunger years, and the economic boom within the framework of an unusual love story with sparse means.