The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe is blown up. Germany is gripped by terrorist hysteria. While the rest of the country searches for Islamist terrorists, Hamburg historian Josef Maria Stachelmann has quite different worries. His days as university lecturer are over: he now scratches a living running an agency for historical investigations. Barely has he settled into his new office when he is visited by the classic blonde beauty. The German-American Cecilia hires Stachelmann to look for her father Franz Laubinger who disappeared without a trace at the end of the 50s. He last lived in Wolfsburg. Stachelmann soons finds out that Laubinger was forced to leave the Federal Republic, and that people who were persecuted in Nazi Germany were by no means free to live in peace in Adenauer’s republic. But just as he thinks he’s solved the case, he becomes caught up in a web of fear and hatred. A stranger threatens Felix, his friend Anne’s son. What is the stranger trying to warn Stachelmann about? What is he being held back from? To protect Felix, Stachelman embarks on his dangerous investigations. At the end, he pursues a murderer who learned to kill for reasons of state.
Stachelmann’s arresting fifth case shows how injustice in the past can provoke crime in the present day.
