Kaethe Shalk faces a new life of boundless complexity when the Berlin Wall comes down and the ruin of the East stands in stark contrast to the exuberance of the West.

Having lived in America for many years, Kaethe Shalk returns to Berlin to try to come to terms with the Berlin of her youth. Her journey from America to the broken ground of contemporary Germany becomes an act of recovery: of the lives intertwined by politics and passion, of memory and the invented self, and of Kaethe's search for a daughter lost to her, now grown and living in isolation from her mother's past and present, somewhere in vast, resurgent Berlin.