From hundreds of conversations that the poet Reiner Kunze had with students, apprentices, workers, and soldiers of the National People's Army, as well as from experiences with his own teenage daughter, these prose texts emerged. In them, he depicts the everyday lives of young people in the GDR with concise, laconic words. The title, a quote from Truman Capote's "The Grass Harp," is bitterly ironic, as after all that Reiner Kunze has experienced, the years of development for critical young people who want to realize themselves in socialist Germany are not so wonderful at all. Children are already drilled to hate the class enemy, toy machine guns at the ready. Eleven- and twelve-year-olds learn in socialist military education how to kill people. Even more disturbing than the exercise of power from above, the author portrays the perfect oppression.