A book like an earthquake. For over fifty years, Peter Wawerzinek struggled with the question of why his mother left him as an orphan in East Germany. Then he found and visited her. The result is a literary explosive device unlike anything German literature has offered before. Her absence was the black hole, the all-consuming negative pole in Peter Wawerzinek's life. How could his mother have done this to him, leaving him as a small child in East Germany when she fled to the West? The boy, shuffled between various children's homes, remained silent well into his fourth year.