Es gibt kein Zurück

A man in search of the meaning of life - a moving road movie. A. W. Mumme, a well-known radio essayist, receives a letter from the pension insurance and begins to grapple with himself: Is 1,183 euros in pension all that remains for him after a long working life? Just in time, the idea from a literary agent that he should write a popular autobiography comes to him. With a generous advance, Mumme treats himself to a retro motorcycle. He sets off on a journey from Berlin through Leipzig and Paris to the Côte d’Azur, where, in an hour of inner paralysis, his concept of meaning - both in life and society - shatters. There is no turning back. The images of the journey reflect Mumme's life: as a rootless child of a hippie mother, as a young man in a gloomy city of intellectual fashions called West Berlin, as a glamorous media figure alongside an equally glamorous woman, and as a friend of a dandy artist - a decades-long friendship that does not survive the political strains of a pandemic. The specter that truly haunts Mumme is the hateful term of the old white man, whom he absolutely does not want to be - the acronym AWM, however, is simultaneously an anagram of his name. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler tells with much wit, while also being melancholic and moving, the story of a man searching for answers to the questions that life poses.