As a longing animal, the wild goose runs through recent history. When life in the cities of the 19th century becomes difficult to bear, it points the way to nature. In Selma Lagerlöf's novel 'Nils Holgersson's Wonderful Journey', she unites the Swedish nation by revealing the meaning of community to a wayward boy, which also becomes a role model for German readers. During the First World War, she was sung about by the soldiers in the trenches and a little later became omnipresent in European culture: as the heraldic animal of nature conservation, as the heroine of the revolution in Bertolt Brecht as well as the 'character animal of the north' in Bengt Berg, animal photographer and writer whose dreams of Germanic primeval landscapes entered into the ideology of National Socialism, in film, in art, not least in science, where the zoologist Konrad Lorenz believes that he has discovered in the greylag goose the foundations of human coexistence threatened by civilization. Wherever the wild goose appears, it becomes the cipher of a world in upheaval. Thomas Steinfeld follows in their footsteps - and paints a captivating picture of the 20th century.