Lorenz Beckhardt, brought up in a Catholic boarding school, only found out as an adult that he was a Jew and that many of his relatives were victims of the Holocaust. He meticulously follows the history of his family -- from grandfather Fritz Beckhardt, the ardent patriot and World War II pilot, to the generation that after 1945 dared to make a new start in the country of the perpetrators. Beckhardt describes the compensation bureaucracy in the early Federal Republic and the everyday humiliation by neighbors in a shocking manner.