Well-known actor Ernst Stein (played by Rolf Ludwig) protested against the military invasion of Prague in 1968 by quitting the stage during a performance of "King Lear," never to return. For him, the theater has lost its claim to being a moral institution.

Stein spends the next two decades living on the outskirts of Berlin and receding into his own imagination. With a reputation for being a peculiar outsider, his only friends are the neighborhood young people, including twenty-year-old Sara, who he falls in love with. But even Stein's isolated existance is turned upside down by the political and social upheaval of the Wende.