Monday, 30 January. Joseph Roth no longer wants to wait in Berlin for the news the day will bring. Early in the morning he walks to the station and takes a train to Paris. Thomas Mann in Munich, meanwhile, spends the next ten days hardly concerned with politics, but rather with his lecture on Richard Wagner. Uwe Wittstock unfolds a mosaic of events and visualises the atmosphere of those days, marked by fear and self-deception among the writers, passivity or determination among others. Who cozied up to the new rulers, who had to fear for their lives and who had to flee? Based on partly unpublished archive material, a tremendously dense picture of a terrible time emerges.