A biography of a libertarian couple and a life full of passion and eccentricity. It began in 1912 with a chance encounter: Hugo Ball, the theater man at the Munich Kammerspiele, meets Emmy Hennings, the eccentric chanteuse and drug-addicted muse of significant men, who has just published her first poems. The dazzling mask performer, a favorite of the Berlin and Munich bohemians, and the rebellious poet, wavering between activism and anarchism, find each other in times of war and begin their joint "play of book-making." Paradise had been promised to Hugo Ball, but it was a rocky road that led the extravagant couple to the center of literary modernism. From the provincial narrowness of childhood and youth, through the Berlin and Munich avant-garde, to emigration to Switzerland in 1915 and the founding of the "Cabaret Voltaire.".