This remarkable book follows the lives of three friends, Solomon Freund, a Jew, Erich Wiesser, his Catholic neighbor and "brother in blood", and Miriam Rathenau, whom both boys love, and who happens to be niece of 's foreign minister Walther Rathenau. From their youth helping at their parents' co-owned tobacco shop, the boys find their relationship strained, as was all of , by the growth of the National Socialist party and the descent of into a Nazi hell.