Summer 1990: A few weeks after the fall of the Iron Curtain two friends who knew each other as youthful friends from Budweiser meet in a southern Bohemia inn – German doctor Karl Tomaschek and Czech engineer Jan Hadrava. Their confrontation by night would become a painful encounter with the past, an unmasking of repression and breaches in memory. Ten months later Tomaschek would be found on the terrace of an Austrian alpine pasture, frozen after a sudden snowfall.

Peter Becher, literary historian and writer, relates in this novel the inextricable entanglement of friendship and betrayal, triumph and defeat, power and weakness, which made the history of Bohemia in the twentieth century so catastrophic.