Efraim, a German Jew by birth, is sent as an adolescent to live with his wealthy uncle in England. In 1962 he returns to Berlin for the first time in twenty-seven years; his assignment to trace the abandoned, illegitimate daughter of his corpulent empolyer. Appalled by a city whose present decencies only serve to remind him of his past atrocities, and stimulated by his affair with a Maoist actress, Efraim, in search of identity and salvation, begins his fragmented autobiography…