Marcel Beyer has written a grand new novel, a panorama spanning German history from the 1930s up to the present. Like in his successful Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes), Marcel Beyer so skilfully interweaves the personal with the historical that we follow spellbound the catastrophic course of events in 20th-century Germany.

The ornithologist Hermann Funke, the first-person narrator, relates two histories: his own, and that of the zoologist Ludwig Katenburg. Born in 1903, Kaltenburg is working in Poznan when he first meets Hermann, then still a child, in the late 1930s. After the collapse of the Third Reich, they meet again in Dresden, to where Hermann fled with his parents in 1945. The traumatic night of bombs experienced after his arrival leaves him orphaned, and determines his future: the child who in February 1945 watched birds drop in flames from the sky goes on to become an ornithologist.

In post-war Dresden, Ludwig Kaltenburg establishes a zoological institute that wins international renown. He becomes a kind of father figure to Hermann Funke, who is now the institute’s most important employee. How do the two scientists – one established, the other with his future before him – experience in Dresden the founding and subsequent strengthening of the GDR, what unexpected turns do their lives take, why does Kaltenburg turn his back on the GDR, and how does Funke see the ultimate collapse of his state?

Marcel Breyer describes in detail the situation in East Germany through the activities of the biologist and the ornithologist and their circle of acquaintances. The end is the story with which the book begins: The ornithologist, pensioned, sits alone in the natural science museum in Dresden.