In almost four hundred tender, angry, and reality-saturated pages, it aims to demonstrate what it truly meant to be an individual disregarded by the Hegelian worldview and its left and right admirers over sixty years of German history. Among the most instructive sections of this historical chronicle against one's will are the portraits that come together to form a whole gallery of the thirties (and beyond). Those figures, who threaten to disappear behind the paper wall of political legends for the younger reader or have been neatly arranged in smooth marble poses by literary history, come to life here once again as beings of nerve and blood: Joseph Roth, Ernst Toller, Ernst Bloch, the young Bert Brecht, Georg Lukács, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank, Lion Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann.