Berlin, 1955. Latvian theater director Asja Lacis, crushed by the experience of ten years in a labour camp in Kazakhstan, returns home and visits her old friend Bertolt Brecht. After a brief conversation in which they both try to conceal their misery, Bertolt tells Asja that Walter Benjamin, the love of her life has died. Turbulent emotions pull Asja back to bittersweet memories of her relationship with one of the most influential European philosophers of the 20th century. This novel reinstates the figure of Asja Lacis, a woman unknown to the general public, whose potential has been denied and whose talent reduced to a mere anecdote, a footnote in the life of a wise man. Asja shows us how a personality can resist the greatest atrocities, yet succumb to a sentimental dead end.