Can a book overcome a life pain? Yes.

When photographer Bettina Flitner learned of her beloved sister's suicide a few years ago, her first reactions were shock, paralysis and despair. But then she decided to tell the story. The result is a deeply moving, masterful text, a book of liberation.

With an incorruptible eye trained on photography, full of devotion, wit and sadness, Bettina Flitner tells the story of an intimate sibling relationship: a childhood in the 1970s, the years at the Waldorf School, memories of charismatic grandparents, including a famous reform pedagogue, the father a cultural manager and exponent of the left-wing liberal educated middle class of the old FRG, a year in New York, vacations on Capri, the first adventures in love during puberty. And then the cracks: the children's overtaxing by their parents' lives of sexual libertinage, the mother's flight into depression, the parents' unfulfillable career expectations of their daughters. Bettina Flitner's book is an admirably courageous step towards confronting the ghosts of the common past, freeing oneself from them and thus being able to come to terms with the death of loved ones. A book about a subject that for many people is still occupied by taboos and silence.