Explosive discovery in the attic: Many years after the death of his parents, Joachim Krause finds more than a thousand letters they wrote between 1933 and 1945, along with some diaries. Like piecing together a puzzle, their thoughts, lives, and actions gradually take shape in the texts. The young people seek orientation and argue—about National Socialism and the Jews, about the meaning of war and death, about sexual morality and questions of faith. The mother turns out to be a convinced National Socialist, while the father maintains a critical distance from the ethnic ideology. Their letters become authentic testimonies of contemporary history. "Such unvarnished voices from the past help us understand the world from which today's emerged. We hear who our parents were before we knew them.".