There he is informed that his publisher, Peter Suhrkamp, has been imprisoned by the Gestapo but that his book about the submarine war in the Atlantic, Jäger im Weltmeer, has nonetheless been approved for publication.
In his other profession of war artist, he is commissioned to paint a group portrait of Admiral Karl Dönitz and distinguished U-Boot captains, but new orders instead send him to Paris, and when the Allied invasion begins, to the front.
Here he meets up again with his captain from his time on submarine U-96, Heinrich Lehmann-Willenbrock, called der Alte, 'the old man', in Buchheim's novels.
From La Pallice, with a taciturn driver and a garrulous aging submariner, Buchheim drives through the chaos and destruction of the final days of the German occupation,[2] in a car powered by wood gas, seeking to locate Sagot in Paris.
The first edition, by Hoffmann und Campe, was an unusually large and expensive book, the subject of an intensive advertising campaign.