Prag, poste restante

Seventeen-year-old Leonie, the only daughter of Heinrich Mann, flees in 1933 with her Jewish mother to her hometown of Prague. However, the violence of Nazi rule will catch up with them: Maria "Mimi" Kanova dies in 1947 as a result of her imprisonment in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. In the same year, Leonie meets the popular Czechoslovak storyteller Ludvik Askenazy. These are the key dates of a search for traces that spans an entire century. In this journey, Heinrich Mann's grandson Jindrich recounts his own privileged childhood in a communist regime during the 1950s, the neighbors who disappear, and his mother, who "doesn't fit into any category" and undertakes mysterious trips to East Berlin. Until the "Prague Spring" of 1968 drives the family back to the West, and twenty-year-old Jindrich, now a third-generation émigré, tries to find his footing in student-driven Berlin. The book contains the entirely unknown, dreamlike yet precisely reconstructed story of the "other Manns" – and of a small boy holding his mother's hand in a fairytale-like Prague.