Set in Switzerland, this imaginative narrative begins just after the author suffers a nervous breakdown while delivering a doctoral seminar at the University of Basle. In a luxurious sanatorium for mentally disturbed patients called Humanitas, he is asked to write about his life experiences, including his own awareness of the Nazi era and what it meant to be one of 'Hitler's children'; he is regularly interviewed by a Board of distinguished psychiatrists based on these accounts. An involuntary prisoner, he longs to achieve his freedom and be reunited with his wife.