Growing up on the grounds of one of Germany's largest psychiatric hospitals is somehow - different. For Joachim, the director's youngest son, the patients are like family. They are also much nicer to him than his two older brothers, who drive him into fits of rage. His mother, painting watercolors, longs for Italian summer nights instead of constant German rain, while his father secretly, but not discreetly enough, goes his own way. But while Joachim slowly grows up, his world, not only through the loss of his first love, gets more and more cracks...
"Captain" Werner Träsch is quite astonished: the fresh wind of social change is also blowing among the tradition-conscious Berlin garbage workers. His boss, Dorn, has got it into his head that women should finally be employed as refuse collectors.
From the translucent golden eggs of the Tibetan bearded vulture to those of the British guillemot with their Jackson Pollock-like splashes, German ornithologist Max Schönwetter (1874-1961) collected them all. He devoted his life to oology, the study of birds’ eggs. But while Schönwetter created order in his world of eggs, chaos broke out in the world around him on the eve of the Second World War.