Albert Ballin - a charismatic shipping magnate, managing director of HAPAG, friend of the Emperor, a peace diplomat acting privately yet in the service of the Empire, a guarantor of humane emigration for millions of Europeans to the New World - the "King of Hamburg"! Like no other, he shaped global shipping around 1900, and like no other, he vehemently tried to prevent the looming First World War. In his Hamburg home on Feldbrunnenstrasse and his summer house outside the city, all the prominent politicians, journalists, and entrepreneurs of Germany and the world came and went. Yet, the man who came "from the bottom" and suddenly passed away in the last days of the war was quickly forgotten - made to be forgotten starting in 1933. A hundred years later, in the attic of a farmhouse in Upper Austria, the cinema entrepreneur and great-grandson of Albert Ballin, Heinz Huebe, opens up.