Leaving behind a Halifax scarred by war and a country mired in Depression, young Michael Renner turns a family errand to Berlin into a chance to embrace his German roots. In this city that is surging in spirit, buoyed by the rising tide of National Socialism after years of crippling humiliation, Michael marries and takes a job auctioning the property of those forced to flee the new Germany, then another managing a punch-card census of the European Jews. But the dogma blinding Michael to his new life grows poisonous and begins to unravel. Berlin's legendary sexual underworld, where masochistic cabarets mimic the spiralling violence on the streets above, proves to be dangerously irresistable - as does the prostitute Michael turns to for solace. I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin is a powerful, moving story about the way ordinary people slip naively into horror, and how in times of moral chaos, disgrace might be the only place a man of conscience can live with himself.