In his chronicle of the lives of two families, Christoph Hein encapsulates the futile hope for an existence in freedom. He has succeeded in creating a novel of the century: one that encompasses a century, reflects a century, and makes a century understandable and relatable. "I stumbled into this novel by accident or rather out of convenience." With this sentence begins an exploration of two men, the writer Rainer Trutz and Waldemar Gejm, a professor of mathematics and linguistics at Lomonosov University, who has been developing a new field of research for years: mnemonics, the study of the origin and function of memory. However, both National Socialism and Stalinism will soon become a curse for Trutz and Gejm: the German, having fled Nazi Germany, is killed in a Soviet labor camp.