With photographs by Johannes Paul Spengler. On the road across the USA, from the East to the West coast, notebook and camera at the ready. Pictures, landscapes, people, experiences and stories come unite in a song with many voices, a love song to traveling and to life before death. A loud bang – and the Mercedes 300 Turbo Diesel in which the author Astrid Rosenfeld and the photographer Johannes Paul Spengler wanted to drive from New York to San Franscisco has been crashed into by another car before they have even left Manhattan. Totalled. »You can’t kill a Mercedes«, the used-car salesman had told them, and that the car was in excellent condition with only one previous owner. His Eau de Toilette was even still in the glove compartment, and Astrid Rosenfeld secretly names the unknown man Frankie. And then the journey begins. Not in Frankie’s car, after all, but with his spirit and his story along for the ride nonetheless. An adventure-filled road trip across Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas to California, filled with crazy, absurd and heart-wrenching encounters.

Berlin, 2004. Edward Cohen, the owner of a hip fashion boutique, has heard again and again since he was a child how much he resembles his great-uncle Adam, who he never met. At the moment when Edward's life in Berlin breaks into a thousand pieces, Adam's legacy falls into his hands: a stack of papers, addressed to a certain Anna Guzlowski. Berlin, 1938. Adam Cohen is a dreamer. But he is a Jewish boy in 1930s Germany, and this is no time for dreaming. When eighteen-year-old Adam meets Anna, he suddenly realises what all his dreams were about. But while the Cohen family are planning their escape to England, Anna disappears without a trace on the night of the 9th November 1938. How can Adam possibly find her? With intrepid humour, Astrid Rosenfeld tells a moving story about fate and great emotions, and about how the past permeates the present.

Lorenz Brauer is the new star of the international art scene. But hardly anyone suspects that his meteoric ascent is due not just to talent, but to the cunning plan of two very influential women. His younger brother knows that, however. And he also knows that the up-and-coming artist's enigmatic paintings point back to their childhood – the time when Lorenz and Karl had just lost their mother, and when Elsa came into their lives. Elsa, with her matchstick arms, cocky mouth and extra-vagant dresses. The girl one brother lost his heart to, and the other his illusions. The girl neither of them can forget. Tenderly and mercilessly, Astrid Rosenfeld's story spans from a crazy childhood in the countryside to the glamour and perversions of the modern art world.