A manor house in East Prussia, paid for by the military salary of the absent owner, an officer. Inside, a Chekhovian personage — the lady of the manor, a languorous Berlin beauty — along with her twelve-year-old son Peter, his tutor, an elderly aunt who oversees the household, two Ukrainian maidservants, and a Polish groom who tends the horses. A Nazi lives in the new settlement across the way. The first refugees driven westward from the Baltic territories by the advancing front turn in for a few nights at the manor. We watch along with Kempowski as this old world, as if in slow motion, begins to sway. The Baltic refugees are delighted by the bread with sausage that is still served to them here, they mourn for their lost homeland, they move on. The Polish groom is already beginning to prepare the coach, to pack a few suitcases for his master’s family. But the lady of the manor gazes out the window, the son looks through his microscope, the tutor speaks of Goethe’s concept of “perfection.” How long does it take us to notice the end of the world? To notice that the end of the world might mean our own end?