Martin faces the decision of his life: Should he accept the professorship in Boston? Leave everything behind and find happiness in the distance? Then the death of his childhood friend forces him in a different direction: The visit to his old hometown becomes a journey back in time for him and his partner Nina. Here, in the settlement of Spiegelberg, everything had begun. Seven friends, friends for life. The 60s and 70s, wild and in many ways catastrophic years marked by violence, rejection, and speechless parents still haunted by the horrors of war. Martin realizes that his origins continue to hold him captive to this day. And not just him. With wisdom, wit, and great linguistic sensitivity, Michael Göring describes the struggle of his protagonists between the claim to self-determination on one hand and the constraints of their own biographies on the other.