Sperber's great fiction trilogy spans the period from 1931 through the rise of Hitler and the struggles of international Communism to the early postwar era. It traces the lives of intellectuals, partisans, Communists, and ex-Communists during those turbulent, desperate, and heartbreaking years.

This second novel in the series is one of brooding self-analysis and remorse, an account of some people's desperate attempts to find new meaning to their lives.

Manès Sperber won the Georg Büchner Prize and, shortly before his death in 1984, the prestigious German Book Trade Peace Prize.