Germany, 1939. Two children watch as their parents become immersed in the puzzling mechanisms of power. Sieglinde lives in middle-class Berlin, where her father censors books, cutting out forbidden words like ‘love’ and ‘mercy’. Erich tends beehives in the countryside near Leipzig, under the shadow of questions no one will answer. Watching over them is the wish child, an enigmatic narrator whose voice emerges from deep within a shattered nation.