Frederick von Kammacher has lost his medical practice. His reputation is shot due to a paper he wrote about Anthrax, but what others thought was nothing more than a dyed piece of wool. His wife does not recognize him when he visits her in the sanitarium and he has put his three children in a boarding school. He has nothing left in his native Germany and so he decides at the last moment to begin his life anew in America. Then he meets Ingigerd Hahlstroem, a wonderful dancer he'd seen on the stage several times. Frederick must decide whether or not to continue his new life with a new woman or stay faithful to his wife. Gerhart Hauptmann was one of the pioneers for the German naturalist movement in literature. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912.

Author Biography

Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann (1862 - 1946) was a German dramatist and novelist. He is counted among the most important promoters of literary naturalism, though he integrated other styles into his work as well. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1912. In 1910, Hauptmann's first novel was published, The Fool in Christ, Emanuel Quint, which told the story of a wandering preacher who mixed sun worship and Christianity together. His 1912 novel, Atlantis became the basis for a Danish silent film of the same name. The novel was written one month before the RMS Titanic disaster and the film's 1913 release was less than one year after the event. The storyline for both involved a romance aboard a doomed ocean liner and the similarity to the disaster became obvious. This coincidental untimeliness caused the film to be banned in Norway due to perceived insensitivity. Nevertheless, excited by the possibilities of this new medium, Hauptmann wrote several screenplays (e.g. Appolonius of Tyre), none of which was ever filmed.