Regina Scheer spans the arc in her impressive novel from the 1930s through World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall and into the present. She tells the story of the beginnings of the GDR, when the weakened leftist forces, affected 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.