One of the prisoners, Paco, had been a monk at the same monastery 20 years earlier, before he was excommunicated and went to work as a sailor.
The lieutenant Pedro, who is responsible for having the monks killed and for planning to execute all the prisoners, struggles with guilt and discusses this with Paco, asking him for absolution.
[1] The book was published in Germany by Ulrich Riemerschmidt Verlag [de] in 1942, when Stefan Andres lived in exile in Italy with his Jewish wife.
[3] Along with the 1936 novella El Greco Paints the Grand Inquisitor, it is Andres' most famous work and became widely read in Germany in the period after World War II.
[1] It was adapted into the West German television film Wir sind Utopia, directed by Dagmar Damek [de] and starring Michael König [de] and Alexander Radszun, which premiered on ZDF on 23 February 1987.