 In the 1930s, a dashing English débutante abruptly abandoned her country to marry a German aristocrat, and lived with him through the horrors of the war and defeat. After invading Russian troops executed the Count, she escaped back to England with her infant daughter. The story opens in the early 1990s with the now aged Countess Alice, who tutors students in German, and who has spent the last 45 years living off the kindness of her rich and royal relatives. The daughter has grown up to be a sour and disappointed librarian, living at home to care for her aging mother. A reporter is interested in talking to the Countess about her wild and celebrated youth, but with the Wall having just fallen, he is also interested in discussing her German past. The Countess refuses to discuss it, and has revealed little to anyone about her time in Hitler s Germany, despite her daughter s life-long pleas for information. Now that the reporter shows up asking the same questions, the tension between the two women, already strained, begins to rupture the thread of their bond when the daughter announces that, now that East Germany is reunified, she is going there to see the past for herself...