The rehabilitation of a poet by Sigrid Damm tells the life of the wild dreamer and unusually gifted German playwright Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, whose story has been distorted over the centuries by half-truths and Goethe's harsh judgment in "Dichtung und Wahrheit." Childhood in the Baltic in a parsonage, study years in Königsberg with Immanuel Kant, flight to Strasbourg and the joyfully productive years there, friendship with Goethe; finally Weimar and Goethe's break with Lenz. After that, his wandering in Switzerland, the onset of illness, and return to Livonia. And the last years in Russian exile, where Lenz dies at the age of forty-two in the streets of Moscow.