Rose wants to leave her father, so she asks for a position with a mad professor who's gonna move to New York. At the beginning, she thinks that the position is that of a nanny, but later she realises that there's no clear position for her in the household; he gets to go with the family to New York. The demented mother, the eccentric and distant father, wild Anneliese - my favourite character - the ignored Waltraut, still almost a baby and so disregarded.

Rose is eager to live Germany because of what happened to his father - a dishonoured teacher, and with a distant cousin of her mother, who happened to shelter her at his home. But this cousin doesn't pay any attention to her, as he is head over heels with Ninel, a socialist and anarchist troublemaker. It's the years prior to the II World War and the Spanish Civil War.

So Rose accepts some money from his cousin and goes to New York with this eccentric family. The eccentric patriarch is a disregarded scholar without a position at the moment. Luckily, they have a benefactor, an eccentric unacomplished but wealthy young man who lives from the royalties of the children's books which his late father used to write - this is a character based loosely on Christopher Milne, the son of A. A. Milne on which he based the Christopher of the Winnie the Pooh series. He is called the Bear Boy, but never to his face. And as I said, luckily he supports the family, or they would have starved to death.