Summer 1949, at the height of the Cold War. Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann returns to Germany for the first time after sixteen years of exile in the United States. With his daughter Erika, an actress, writer and rally driver, he drives a black Buick across a country in ruins, from American-run Frankfurt to Soviet-controlled Weimar. Along the way, Mann must face not only a divided homeland but also the deep fractures within his own family.