A bachelor in search of promise. The literary scholar Matthias Roth is a bachelor leading a quiet life in a university town in the province. He engages with Joseph Conrad's theory that it is not love, but emptiness that constitutes the essence of life, yet he remains ever in search. In his interactions with women such as Gisela, his friend's wife who becomes the object of his secret passions, Marianne, the pragmatic student, and Mrs. Bartels, his landlady, Roth attempts to find roots in everyday life. A person who is not easily forgotten, neither as a contemporary nor as a character in art. Leonore Schwartz in the Tagesspiegel.