A bright flash of a comet turns out to be 1918 for the further history of mankind. November 11, 1918 is not only the last day of the world war, which threw the entire old order into the abyss. This day is the embodiment of emerging hopes for a better life. New possibilities and new dreams have flared up, and, like the tail of a comet, a string of pictures and faces trails behind them. In the book of the famous German historian Daniel Schönpflug (b. 1969), this unique historical moment is embodied in a series of real destinies: Virginia Woolf, Harry S. Truman, Arnold Schoenberg, Mahatma Gandhi, Rudolf Hess, Ho Chi Minh and many others. The keen eye of a historian helps to see in this motley kaleidoscope of events the seeds of future triumphs and disasters. The book is both poetic and instructive: covered in images of red poppies in Flanders fields, it teaches you to recognize the symptoms of the future in the events that seem most distant from history.