Hannah Arendt and Ruth C. Cohn never met. Yet it could have happened so easily. It’s as if they always just missed each other, as if they had unknowingly walked past one another – in the alleys of Heidelberg, in the streets of Berlin, in the cafés of Lisbon, where émigrés desperately awaited their visas in 1941. Or in New York, where the two women lived and worked just a few streets apart. This novel creates a fictional encounter and relates the life stories and thoughts of the great philosopher and the significant therapist to one another. The character of the aspiring pastor Friderieke brings the intellectual legacy of both women into our time. "Trying to simply be a human being?" This is Friderieke's life theme and the shared challenge for our present.