A significant chapter in the history of the Federal Republic, the oscillating elegy between melancholy and fury for the lost generation of the seventies, was written by Matthias Bischoff in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung upon the release of Ralf Rothmann's first novel in 1991. The author allows the character Kai Carlsen from Berlin's Hinterhaus to narrate his story, which takes place in the Ruhr area. There, mining damage shapes the faces of the houses, and fathers work in the pit. The quiet rebel, infected with heart disease through his wife, and the stormy red-light Casanova becomes a bricklayer and discovers a life behind life. When Kai Carlsen finds work and accommodation with Eckhart Eberwein, a former civil engineer and operator of Blow up, a meeting point for subculture, the dreamer encounters new daring friends in his quest for inner freedom. However.