In the 1950s Berlin, struggling to recover from the war, had come under four-power occupation. More, it was now the object of a fierce ideological struggle between Stalinist Communism and capitalist democracy, between traditional German values and tender hopes for a new and better Europe - which often came down to a contest between idealism and cynic pessimism. From these years when the inhabitants of Germany's old Reich capital re-evaluated their past and tried to set their future, comes the diary of an expatriate student, himself in search of a new spiritual homeland and as anxious to learn from the visitors and the vanquished, from the critics and the apologists. His work brought him in daily contact with people from all walks of life in East and West, some famous, many of them simple workers and refugees. Too poor to own a camera he drew pictures in his notebook of people and places so he could remember them, and sometimes these sketches recorded a human situation which would have been too hard to capture in a photograph or words.