Certainly no generation of filmmakers has been as preoccupied with the past as the current generation of Germans, many of whom have worked hard to claim, by way of understanding, a painful and often shameful inheritance. Nico Hofmann's first feature (he directed several films for television before this) tells of a young journalist delving into his late father's wartime activities in Poland. When Thomas Kleinert (Karl-Heinz von Liebezeit) learns, thirteen years after the fact, that his father's death was a suicide, he is compelled to search for reasons. What his investigation unearths is a portrait of a man far different from the father he had known, one who unscrupulously took advantage of the war to expand his own business, among other things taking over an "Aryanized" Polish company whose labor force consisted of prisoners on their way to the camps. But, once driven by this kind of ruthlessness, why suicide now? It seems that revelations in the press concerning the suppressed facts of Eberhard Kleinert's unsavory past were thwarted by his death. Now Thomas is faced with the heartsickening prospect of making his own investigation public. As if to underscore the meaning of its title, the film slips easily between present and past-with the same actor playing both father and son.