The protagonist is a concentration-camp survivor who is summoned back to Vienna to testify at a belated war-crimes trial. In the course of his reluctant return, he meets the past and the present in Austria making readers aware of how things were and how much of history and of the legacy of racism still lingers on today. This confrontation/Assimilation makes for, among other things, an intergenerational psychological ghost story. The book touches on every aspect of the unresolved and perhaps unresolvable relations between contemporary Germans/Austrians and Jews. One sub-theme concerns the Left's resistance to Nazism. Another takes us inside the workings of contemporary Austrian bureaucracy. There are also invariably impossible romantic relationships between Jews and Germans.