Anton Stöver's marriage is broken, his affairs are over, and as a scientist, he finds himself at a dead end. He wants to research Antonio Gramsci, the defining figure of Italian communism, in Rome. There, he meets a young woman whom he becomes obsessively infatuated with. Meanwhile, he continues to grapple with the past: the frail, feverish Gramsci is recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. He is meant to save Italy from Mussolini's rise to power, but instead, he falls in love with a Russian comrade. Nora Bossong tells a story with a keen sense of the absurd about the conflict between deep feelings for a person and the struggle for a greater cause.