Eugen Ruge's novel masterfully chronicles the decline of the German Democratic Republic through the eyes of the Umnitzer family. The story pivots around the 90th birthday of the patriarch in East Berlin in 1989, just before the fall of the Wall. Through a mosaic of perspectives and flashbacks spanning four generations—from exile in Mexico to life under communism and the eventual disillusionment—the book paints a rich, intimate, and often darkly humorous portrait of a family and an ideology crumbling under the weight of history.