The GDR seen through the eyes of Tamar and Shoukri, one the daughter of a Judeo-Algerian officer of French Intelligence during the Algerian War of Independence, whom she holds responsible for the death of her mother in detention, the other a Palestinian exile grown up in Lebanon. 

Tamar and Shoukri are students of Education who meet during their internship at a Polytechnic High School in the late 1980's. While Shoukri lives an austere life focused solely on his studies and the prospect of teaching children in Palestinian refugee camps while performing operative duties in the resistance movement, Tamar takes a lively part in the affairs of the people she encounters.

Through her, we get to know the personages whose stories (apart from her gradually emerging relationship with Shoukri) make up the five main plots of the novel: her mentor, Mr Steiner, a veteran teacher, with whom she initially has an affair, which results in a suicide attempt of his wife, Rocco, one of the pupils in the class she attends to -a boy from a broken home who is failed by school and society, as it were, and dies in a road accident on his escape from a care institution, Mrs Tannenberger, her mentor, whose critical thought exercises a great influence on the formation of her pupils, and Mr Lilienkrohn, a former Moscow exile and high-ranking under cover State Security official whose son dies in the attempt to defect via the sea border. Lilienkrohn's need to cover up the incident leads him to seek the collaboration of Tamar's father who, when diagnosed with terminal cancer, comes to the GDR to see his estranged daughter in the attempt to clarify to her the circumstances of her mother's death. Arriving there during the Leipzig Trade Fair as representative of a French company, he is identified and apprehended by State Security as an enemy agent. Lilienkrohn enlists his help in covering up the circumstances of his son's death in exchange for safe passage and forces Tamar to leave the country when the operation is concluded successfully.

The ensemble of characters, all of them based on personages from the author's own immediate environment, in their stories, their disappointments and hopes as reflected in their social and interpersonal relations, makes for a critical study of GDR society in the 1980's, its historical and personal context and thus, in a more general sense, of self-perception, expectations and conflictful social reality in post-revolutionary societies.