With this work, Hermann Lenz continues his Swabian family biography. The writer Eugen Rapp returns from American captivity to the torn Germany of the years 1946-1948. He lives in his parents' house, sharing cramped quarters with his family and his Jewish wife. The young couple resides in a tiny, unheated attic room. Rapp begins to write there. He feels alienated in the present, uprooted by history. In a petty-bourgeois environment, beset by family troubles, in a time that demands material sacrifice, he successfully defends the egoism of the writer and completely retreats into his inner world, into his writing, which becomes his true life.