Los Angeles, the City of Angels: There, the narrator spends several months in the early nineties at the invitation of the Getty Center. She traces the fate of a certain L., who emigrated from Nazi Germany to the USA. Time and again, she is interrogated about the situation in reunified Germany: Is the virus of contempt for humanity being revived in the new, uncertain German conditions? In her daily reading, in conversations, in dreams, the narrator confronts an event from her past that plunges her into an existential crisis and leads to a struggle for the truthfulness of her own memory. Christa Wolf's new major novel is also autobiographical prose: It tells of a human life that endures three forms of German state and society, and of a confrontation with one's own history.