1989 - a significant year of remembrance lifts the skirts: Fifty years since the start of the war, forty years of the Federal Republic and the GDR. And I will turn sixty. This is the first entry in the diary of the writer, who at that time had no idea what dramatic developments this year would bring, developments that would profoundly change the course of history. Kempowski's last entry of that year shows how surprised he was by the fall of the wall: "What a year! In the anniversary year of the French Revolution, a regular bourgeois revolution. And we were there! With our eyes and ears: madness!" It began in late summer 1989, when the people first publicly expressed their discontent with the SED regime. With feverish activity, Kempowski follows how the wave of emigration slowly makes its way to the West through Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.