A novel full of humor and double meanings. A small heath village in the 1960s: Matthias Jänicke, a teacher who is no longer quite young, takes up his first teaching position. Idyllic impressions lead him, at least for a while, to believe in a perfect world. But appearances are deceiving. He soon realizes that almost every villager has something to hide. Walter Kempowski succeeds in bringing the atmosphere of a bygone era to life. From a wealth of precisely observed details, a sharply defined picture emerges of a seemingly sheltered, old-fashioned world, which, however, is already undergoing a sell-out to modernity.