Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it is awfully hard to get it back in.
Harry Robbins Haldeman. Watergate and Related Activities. 1973.

Some high-ranking diplomat in the German Foreign Office seems to have an eccentric hobby: vintage and an­tique stamps, mostly of the times of the German Reich, between 1871 and 1945 — and the period fol­low­ing until 1990. He steals them together with old envelopes from the archives of the Foreign Office. Jack Boul­der gets a helpless telephone call from Berlin:

“We don't know what to do. That’s where you would come in. His office was searched se­cret­ly, no trace of these stamps could be found. Nor does he sell them — anyway, they are not very valuable. But the people working in the ar­chive have seen him slipping them in an en­ve­lope — several times. We have cameras there. Our security is excellent. So — what happens to them? You would find out, wouldn’t you?”

Jack Boulder thinks: “Who cares? Some well paid days in Berlin …” Then other people sud­den­ly care — in Ber­lin and at the other end of the world, in South America.

Boulder meets Amanda Prutz, a charming, well-preserved widow of mature age and small stature who some twenty-five years ago had left her hometown Bytów in Kashubia in Eastern Pomerania. She finally reached Ger­many after a de­tour via Winona, Minnesota, in the United States, but now she spends a lot of time in Patagonia.

She speaks German and wanted to live in Ger­many or, as she put it: “Heim ins Reich — Home to the Reich.” Now a provincial hamlet in the middle of nowhere seems to attract her — ap­pa­rent­ly a closely knit German-speak­ing com­mu­ni­ty. But why does she carry old stamps from the archives of the German Foreign Office to that god­for­saken place?