A deserting soldier treks through the torn-up countryside and abandoned villages trying to
distance himself from the atrocities of war An elderly man sits beneath lime trees
remembering his first sexual encounter one summer night with a female stranger who whispered
another man's name A young woman takes up a job in a care home spending monotonous days
scruPping floors and yearning to dance at the local nightclub The artist Franz Marc lives on
in an imagined life as a patient at an asylum before falling victim to Hitler's policy of
Gnadentod Finally a young Jewish girl the life she once knew destroyed holds her memories
close as she finds refuge in wreckage of her homeland And throughout there is the shadowy
presence of Viktor - one man or many? A looming figure in Germany's own reckoning with its past
Through these five interconnected stories Philippe Claudel reflects on Germany's complex
history and the experiences of its people dismantling the idea of a nation or a people and
exploring the malleability of memory
