honey-sweet flattery to emotional blackmail to just before the sinister threat of hell: there is hardly a register that the narrator and his aging mother do not pull out until they finally achieve what is good for them ... 'Do you know the joke about the mother who gives her son two ties for his birthday? No? So: A mother gives her son two ties for his birthday. Actually, he emphatically forbade gifts of this kind from her. When he wears one of them at the next feast for her sake, she looks at him hurt and says: "And the other one? You probably didn't like it!¿' The reader suspects: This mother-son relationship has never been easy. As the mother gets older, it doesn't get any easier. And so what should actually be self-evident in view of a badly dented car turns into a feint skirmish: that the almost blind mother finally hands over her car keys. And to the Herculean battle when the son wants to get her to sign a power of attorney or even consider the help of a nursing service. What begins as a wrestling with relatives, however, also brings with it existential insights - about love, death and family secrets: why the complicated German history made the displaced mother who she is, and how reconciliation and happiness grow out of lifelong struggles in the end.