It was not love that drove the ambitious lawyer Alois Hofstätter into marriage with the actress Olga, the much older widow of a deceased client; it was her standing and her fortune, her mature erotic charisma and the not insignificant circumstance that she was expecting his child. Hofstätter's true and eternal love belongs to art, and his passion to gambling. His wife pays his debts, and the child has meanwhile grown into a youth, in whom the practising aesthete finds compensation for the unreasonable physical and intellectual demands of his fading wife. The structure of the illusory upper-middle-class world that satisfies the decadent vanity of both is brittle – in the field of tension between outward prestige and inward discontent. A bitter power struggle which ultimately leads to a catastrophe. With a ruthless eye for detail, Evelyn Grill draws a portrait of a callous but pitiable dandy for whom the aestheticising of everyday life replaces the education of the feelings. Grill sketches her characters in a few confident strokes, in a language devoid of flourishes or empty phrases. She avoids sentimentality and false pity. This is way the way stories can still be told, without the all too palatable flavouring of a moral message (Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler).

Born into a Jewish pre-war family in Vienna, Fritzi’s childhood is characterised by visits to the Viennese Prater and early romances. As a young woman, she flees to England to escape Nazi persecution. She marries Theo, returns to Vienna and is a vivacious and warm-hearted mother to her daughter Lea. But sometimes, Fritzi is so overcome with a nameless sorrow that she cannot get out of bed in the morning. Later, her daughter Lea’s life also seems to be a success, full to the brim with marriage, children, grandchildren and career. Yet she too is haunted by dark dreams and family memories. When more and more people arrive in Vienna fleeing war and terror in Syria and Afghanistan, this challenges Lea’s feeling of helplessness and her successful life threatens to fall apart.