Our Present: Once again, the song of a great "we"? Andreas Maier feels uneasy about it. His alter ego in "What We Were" insists on being a singular being that cannot and must not be collectivized in any societal utopias, regardless of their nature. Continuously revisiting childhood, youth, the past, and the present, he pieces together our past decades like a puzzle. From his origins in the Wetterau to travels to Denmark, Italy, or to the "farthest distance": just once across the Main River to the neighboring district of Bornheim. What are we, what is the foreign? The columns gathered here, always starting from the seemingly small, the detail, the unspectacular, are at the same time a literary retrieval of what we are and what we were.