For the fifteen-year-old narrator, her mother Charlotte is the center of the family: loved, all-controlling, and straightforward. However, the obvious is also being ignored by Charlotte: the news from the front is disturbing, and the refugee convoys from the east are passing through the city at increasingly shorter intervals. Until that January morning in 1945, when suddenly stuffed bed sacks are ready in the hallway, only a bright spot remains of the Führer’s portrait on the wall, and the mother puts her silver fox back in the closet with a definitive gesture that her daughter will never forget. Captivating, touching, and with loving irony, Christa Wolf tells the story of the inner entanglements of a family, of a fifteen-year-old coming of age, and of the trauma of flight. Written in 1971, this narrative serves as the prelude to a later, broader work.