Oslo, 1980: If that coin hadn't become stuck in the telephone cabin, she would not have been the first to find out the terrible news – and her life would have taken a different course. Berndorf in the Black Forest, 1997: Lis Kahn, now a bookseller in her early forties, continues to reflect on this turn of events. Back then, aged twenty-five, freshly in love and on the verge of completing her education, she and her brother had decided, at one stroke, to take on the mountainous debts made by their father – a publisher and former factory owner – in order to save him and the rest of the family from ruin. First and foremost, ›The Kahns‹ is a psychological novel, which examines the life of a woman who, as the daughter of an entrepreneur, has been unable to escape the demands of her father; of a woman whose parents and ancestors appear larger-than-life. In addition, the novel relates, in a wonderfully detailed and memorable manner, the story of the Kahn Industrial Co., one of Germany's oldest wood manufacturers - the »Fugger and Welser of the Black Forest.« A family company that once made its fortune in the rafting trade, had its place in world history and was as equally buffeted by successes and failures as the German economy itself. A company that managed to get itself out of the red with the invention of the beer mat, after the legendary chamber pot saucer had gone out of fashion, and that, in order to survive, produced not only telegraph poles but also barracks for the Nazi labour service - a true mirror of German history.