Exil [Exile]

This novel is set in Paris, the city that became a place of exile for thousands of German refugees. In the spring of 1935, Friedrich Benjamin, a well-known publicist and editor of a German émigré newspaper, was kidnapped by the Nazis. Sepp Trautwein, the music professor and composer expelled from his Munich teaching post, gives up music in order to make Benjamin's cause his own. He fights an almost hopeless battle, which eventually finds expression in his art as an encouragement and affirmation. He composed the symphony 'The Waiting Room', a metaphor for the time of exile.