What begins as a cheerful family picture turns out to be a lesson in deformation, but also in human dignity under the pressure of a dictatorship. Feyl, master of the ambiguous idyll, tells the story of Kogler, a Slavic studies lecturer who, as a Sudeten German, moved with his family from Czechoslovakia to the GDR in 1951. He plunged full of verve into the supposed progress in the East. But soon the state took control of his feelings and thoughts. Behind attempts to adapt, resistance grows, which eventually comes out in the open - and Kogler loses his job.
