The "Battle of the Nations" outside Leipzig in October 1813 counts as one of the biggest and bloodiest battles on European soil before the First World War, and as a defining moment in European history: Napoleon's defeat by a combined force of Russians, Austrians, Swedes and Prussians marked the end of his power east of the Rhine. The battle also consolidated Prussia's standing as the dominant state in Germany, with the corresponding eclipse of Napoleon's (former) allies Saxony, Bavaria and Württemberg.

The Saxons themselves, having been on the losing side (against Prussia, rather than for Napoleon, naturally...) saw no particular reason to commemorate the battle, but after German unification they couldn't do much to escape the craze for ruining good views by putting up vast and ugly monuments to glorify the German national spirit and the Hohenzollern dynasty. A huge granite tower, looking rather like the plinth for an invisible statue, dominates the Leipzig skyline and towers over the exhibition grounds to this day. It was inaugurated just in time for the centenary of the battle in October 1913.

Loest uses the story of the battle and monument as a skeleton for a critical examination of the last 180 years in the history of his city, through the eyes of the elderly museum caretaker and former explosives expert Alfred Linden, whom we have to take as at least a slightly unreliable narrator, given that he's being interviewed by a psychiatrist after having been caught trying to blow up the monument. Linden — born two days after the monument was inaugurated — identifies with a Saxon soldier killed in the aftermath of the battle, with a 19th century antiquary collecting skulls on the battlefield, with the socialist building worker Vojchiech Machulski, and with his own father, a quarryman who cut granite slabs for the monument.

Through their eyes and/or Alfred's, we get glimpses of the process of German unification, the Turner movement, abortive attempts at revolution before 1914, the horrors of World War I, the depression and the rise of the Nazis, and the bombing of Leipzig in World War II. After the war we see the pragmatic but rather unconvincing reinvention of the Battle of the Nations as a revolutionary victory (German-Russian brotherhood...) in the war against western imperialism, and the comic "rediscovery" of the printing works where Lenin might have printed Iskra. Alfred is able to point the commissioners charged with setting up a museum to a suitably old-looking shed in the right district, and help them to get their hands on some turn-of-the-century machinery. And a stuffed squirrel...

From that point on, things start to get darker: Alfred gets into trouble with the authorities when he is assigned to work on the demolition of the Paulinerkirche and university buildings in 1968 — buildings he and his father had worked to save from destruction during the fires of 1945 — he sees the city threatened on all sides by open-cast mining for the lignite that was the DDR's only important natural resource, and he comes convinced that it is his duty to destroy the monument that the city no longer deserves. ( )