Autumn landscape, night, decay, decomposition, sinful love - the world of the highly sensitive young poet born in Salzburg in 1887 is eerie. He completes an internship as a pharmacist without a high school diploma and then studies pharmacy. The people of Salzburg regard him as an eccentric. "The Flowers of Evil" by Charles Baudelaire enchants and shapes him. When he finds his own style in 1909, he writes to a friend: "You can hardly imagine the delight that overwhelms one when everything that has pressed upon you for years and has painfully longed for release suddenly and unexpectedly bursts forth into the light, liberated, freeing." The high feeling does not last. He has friends and supporters, but he cannot commit to any professional work and falls into alcohol and drugs.