In the decade before 1914 Schwabing, the suburb of Munich, was a magnet which drew artists, writers, freethinkers and many others who wanted to opt out of bourgeois society and experiment with new ideas. It was the Haight-Ashbury of early 20th-century Europe.

Richard Schlosser is a young man from North German who goes to Munich to study medicine. He suffers from severe sleep deprivation, obsessed by his break with his father, a Lutheran clergyman. Richard is drawn to Schwabing to see Dr Otto Gross, an exciting personality, the son of a famous criminologist, a disciple of Freud, an anarchist and also a drug-addict. When Richard tries to contact him, he discovers he has disappeared. Has he run away? Is he dead? Was he murdered? Has he planned his own disappearance? All of Schwabing is abuzz.