 The narrator in Book One, the mine owner Brauxel, tells of the friendship of Walter and Eduard when they are children in the Vistula estuary, which is a German-Polish borderland (the interwar Free City of Danzig) peopled by Mennonites, Catholics and Protestants.Eduard keeps a diary which he fills with drawings of ideas for scarecrows.The history of this country is told with cruel images of horror and violence from that past that echoes into the present, which becomes Hitler's Germany.