Hans starts a fire. The house burns down and the homeless family finds shelter with their neighbors, the lonely, old, but child-loving bachelor Mr. Pfefferkorn and his grumpy housekeeper Mrs. Luebke. Subsequently Annemarie and the children move in with her parents. Financial worries torment Annemarie and Rudolf, and Annemarie has the desire to earn money to help her husband. She is unable to carry out this plan. (Else Ury is alluding to the economic misery caused by the Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic between June 1921 and January 1924.) In winter the children become seriously ill with the flu, but recover. "Urmütterchens" seventieth birthday is celebrated (the author has apparently overlooked the fact that grandmother has already celebrated her seventieth birthday in volume 3). "Urtantchen" dies soon afterward. In summer, Annemarie travels with her children, Ilse and Marlene, to visit her brother Klaus in the Pomeranian countryside. They live at his estate, Lüttgenheide, on the Baltic Sea, nearby Cousin Peter on Grotgenheide. The story ends with the betrothal of Klaus to Ilse and Peter to Marlene. In the first editions of the book, Else Ury adds an epilogue in which she states that she hesitated to continue the Nesthäkchen series, but was finally moved to do so by the many letters of her young readers. This volume was modernized after World War II. Originally Annemarie sometimes spanks her children, but does not do so in the post-war editions. The Nesthäkchen books represent a German literary genre, the "", a girls' novel that describes maturation and was intended for readers 12 – 16 years old. A Backfisch (“teenage girl”, literally “fish for frying”) is a young girl between fourteen and seventeen years of age. The "Backfischroman" was in fashion between 1850 and 1950. It dealt overwhelmingly with stereotypes, traditional social images of growing girls absorbing societal norms. The stories ended in marriage, with the heroine becoming a "Hausfrau." Among the most successful "Backfischroman" authors, beside Else Ury, were , with her and . Ury intended to end the Nesthäkchen series with volume 6, Nesthäkchen Flies From the Nest, describing Nesthäkchen's marriage.