A large family and generational novel about the GDR and how it fell. In her impressive debut novel, Regina Scheer spans the arc from the 1930s through World War II to the fall of the Wall and into the present. She tells the story of the beginnings of the GDR, when the weakened leftist forces, shaped by fascism and Stalinism, aimed to create a better Germany, of stagnation and disappointment, of the hopeful new beginnings at the end of the 1980s, and of shattered dreams.