From rural Denmark, 28-year-old Malte Laurids Brigge arrives in the exciting Paris of the turn of the century to live as a poet. However, the city of his dreams becomes a nightmare for the sensitive young man: he finds it ugly and repulsive, loud and dirty, loveless and suffocating. The diverse impressions that bombard him are recorded in his diary, leading him to a completely new aesthetic perception. "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge," published in 1910, Rilke's diary novel about the crisis of existence and the crisis of art, is considered - even before the works of Joyce, Proust, or Kafka - the first great novel of literary modernism.