Judith Fanto paints through his eyes a friendship among six very different people who meet as children. In antisemitic Vienna, friendship grows increasingly political, and at the latest with Austria’s Anschluss to Nazi Germany in 1938 the differences within the group become obvious. Hermann remains the “Observer”: someone who watches and understands, but does not act. Hermann remains the one who looks back. And from that arises the novel’s central question: How resilient is friendship when societal conditions no longer permit remaining uninvolved?