As a reward for helping his bankrupt drunkard brother, Josef Schramm is beaten up and left for dead. He survives this misfortune and struggles back to health, but can his generosity and humanity survive his return to society?

"I don't know what you so love in us Scandinavians, since you have your Hermann Stehr anyway." Knut Hamsun, Nobel Laureate in Literature (1920)

Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1907), the Fastenrath Prize (1911), the Schiller Prize (1913), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933), and appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy (1926).