Starting from the year 1956, Brecht's year of death, the film looks back on the time of the First World War and the life Bertolt Brecht in a mixture of fiction and documentary.

Bertolt Brecht, a theatre revolutionary, poet of the state, outsider, looks back on his life in 1956, the year of his death, in East Berlin: from provocations in the Augsburg of the First World War, to the early poetic and amorous height flights in Munich and Berlin in the 1920s, his escape from Hitler and US exile, followed by his later years caught in a dilemma between timeless classic and a failing GDR class fighter, an inflexible free man, and a compromised artist.—Happy_Evil_Dude