Kurt Kuschfeld, a man in his fifties, lives in Reichsburg, Germany, in 1950. He works nights maintaining the street lighting in the little town, and lives in the tower of the train station. He is tired of life, and plans to ask his physician to help him end his life. After the war, the city council is rechristened ‘committee for post-war reconsiderations,’ to retain an air of responsibility when it comes to the Nazi past, though little has changed: most of Reichsburg’s dignitaries are the same as during the war. It is hinted that Mr Kuschfeld, too, might have had a small but decisive role during the war in Reichsburg. During a meeting of the city council, a young delegate of the federal state arrives, a man famous for bringing war criminals to justice with the use of the electric chair. Everyone in Reichsburg with a less than stellar wartime career starts to panic.
Four generations later, in The Hague, a twelve-year-old boy named Victor is looking at a portrait of an old man that hangs in the hall of his parent’s house. He knows it’s his great-grandfather, about whom he knows nothing. The portrait scares him. Meanwhile, his parents are getting ready to go: they’re playing doubles with another couple, leaving the children at home to play together: Victor and his younger brother Benjamin, and the two boys of the other couple, Sicco and Tom. Victor looks up to Sicco: people pay attention when he does things. He makes sure they do. Wanting to impress him, Victor proposes to burn the portrait of his great-grandfather in the garden. When the parents come home, father Karl is silent, but later that evening goes up to Victor’s room and for the first time in his life raises a hand to him. Neither of them mentions the incident to anyone else. Victor understands that the man in the picture was Karl’s grandfather, and that he might not have anything else of his. He resolves to fill the void left by the painting with stories: he’ll ask his own grandfather, whom the family talk to on Skype, for stories about him.
Karl, a poet who has been seized by the urge to write a novel but has yet to act upon that urge, takes up the burning of the portrait as an exhortation to write about his family history. Meanwhile, he has to deal with the fact that his father Gerhardt, who lives in Reichsburg, wants euthanasia in The Netherlands. When they talk on Skype, Gerhardt is very reluctant to tell the family much about his father, the man in the picture: he hints that Kurt Kuschfeld did bad things during the war, and that he, the Gerhardt, chose to distance himself from him. When Karl tries to retrieve some documents necessary for the euthanasia of his father, he makes a startling discovery: Gerhardt Kuschfeld is registered to have died in Germany in 1945.
Back in 1950, Mr Kuschfeld runs into a strange apparition during his night shift: himself. At first he thinks he must have electrocuted himself changing a light bulb. The second Mr Kuschfeld seems to have an agenda: to keep the first Kuschfeld from killing himself by showing him what he once lived for. In a dream, Kuschfeld 2 leads Kuschfeld 1 to the scene of his relationship with Livna Eleonore Winter, a beauty ‘straight out of a Klimt painting’ whom he met when he was a young dockworker. The two lived together for a while, but Kuschfeld grew restless, unsatisfied with the humble scale of his happiness, thinking he has some grand destiny to fulfil. He leaves Livna to start work as head of transport for the rail company in Reichsburg. This is when Kuschfeld splits into two: the first Mr Kuschfeld is the one that left, and the second Mr Kuschfeld stayed with Livna, married her and had a son with her. The second Mr Kuschfeld also shows his alternate self how Livna is living without him: running a pub with her sister. Mr Kuschfeld 1 wonders if it is, after all, not too late for them, and Kuschfeld 2 agrees to deliver a letter to her.
Meanwhile, the people of Reichsburg with something to hide decide that to deflect the attention of the Delegate from their own guilty past, they need a scapegoat. When the doctor lets slip that Kuschfeld is suicidal, they decide there’s no harm in sacrificing him to guarantee their own safety. When a woman arrives to visit him, they see their chance: a Nazi and a Nazi whore, that could make for a convincing story…
When Livna and Kuschfeld see a mob gather in front of the station, they don’t immediately understand what’s going on. When they do, it’s too late: the mob has reached the tower. Livna is thrown to her death from the window, and Kuschfeld is arrested and receives the death penalty.
Gerhardt comes to The Hague to meet with the doctor who will euthanize him, but first he has coffee with his son. Karl explains to him that in order to get euthanasia, you have to officially be alive, and asks him to explain why he was pronounced dead in 1945. Gerhardt reluctantly tells his son that he has lied about his past: not Karl’s grandfather was a Nazi, but he himself. After the war Gerhardt fled to Argentina to lie low for a few years, until he was assumed dead. As euthanasia is now no longer an option for Gerhardt, he returns home. Karl takes the children to the beach to see a whale that’s dying on land. When they get back, his wife asks Karl how he’s doing with the novel. Karl tells her he’s not going to write it.
The final chapters of the book take us back to Reichsburg in 1950, but this is the reality of Mr Kuschfeld 2, who is in fact about to celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary with Livna, with a grand ball in the castle of Reichsburg. Kuschfeld made a small fortune importing ice before the war, and tried his utmost to keep his son Gerhardt out of the clutches of National Socialism: to no avail. During the party, he and Livna anxiously await Gerhardt’s coming, but he is in Argentina. After the feast, Livna reveals a portrait that she had made of her beloved husband.