"Gert Jonke's world," writes Jochen Jung in his afterword, a portrait of the author, "does not come into being; it is there, suddenly and unexpectedly. There are no bridges leading there. Whoever jumps over the first time and falls short will have to jump a second time. By the third time, he will be over, as if drawn by a magnet, and will prefer never to return." In Jonke's school of fluency - which shares only the title with the painful teaching work of piano pedagogue Czerny - a composer finds himself at a celebration hosted by photographer Anton Diabelli and his sister Johanna, which seems to be a precise repetition of the celebration from the previous year, after which everything could again unfold just like the year before, and the onset of a "time catastrophe" can only be averted with great difficulty.