In the summer of 1945, the gaze of a ten-year-old boy from a cellar hole falls upon the German metropolis where he grew up. Before him spreads a vast sea of rubble, a stone desert torn apart by bomb blasts and blown to its foundations. In this landscape of ruins, people are barely surviving under the most miserable conditions, physically and mentally shattered. With a disillusioned perspective, the boy observes the consequences of total destruction around him and the helpless attempts of adults to navigate their way back to a new order amidst the chaos. He listens to the veterans who must incessantly and deeply disturbed recount their experiences from the front, he follows the gravedigger who every morning pushes his handcart to the cemetery, and he watches the street gangs that have seized power after the collapse of state order. Dieter Forte's memoir about the post-war years between 1945 and 1948 is relentless. He has little patience for the unsophisticated optimism that seeks to hide the scars of the past behind the zeal of reconstruction. His book reads like the libretto to a death dance of apocalyptic proportions. With the self-contained novel "In der Erinnerung," Forte completes his trilogy, which he began in 1992 with "Das Muster" and continued in 1995 with "Der Junge mit den blutigen Schuhen.".