Apocalyptic Visions: "On Christmas, I wished for a rat." In the dreams of the narrator, the animal can speak and imposes upon him the vision of the downfall of humanity and the takeover of the Earth by rats. They alone have survived in the city of Gdansk-Danzig, struck by neutron bombs, and are building a new civilization based on solidarity there. In response to these apocalyptic visions, the narrator develops his own stories, partly as film scripts for the media mogul Oskar Matzerath: about the painter Malskat and the false restoration of the 1950s, about the dead forests and the dying power of fairy tales, and about five beloved women who embark on a futile search for Vineta as a place of female utopia in the jellyfish-infested Baltic Sea.