The novel takes place on a single day, June 10, 1927.
Numerous characters—both historical and fictional—intersect on the streets of Berlin. Among them are Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Rosa Luxemburg as a butterfly, a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts. We peer into the minds of men, women, and children, observing their movements, the discrepancies between their intentions and actions, their values ​​and their deeds. We see hope, we see deception, and we see death. The novel employs a variety of styles and techniques: stream-of-consciousness writing, transcripts, newsreels, screenplays, plays, poems, and photographs, culminating in the final paragraph overlapping itself over and over, inverted and repeated, until the text becomes nothing but black slush.
Olsen describes a complex historical moment (Hitler would come to power six years later)—the rise of deadly populism at a time when anything seemed possible and the future within one's grasp.