The young doctor Paul Hein moves from the provinces to Berlin to make his career. There he encounters all the temptations of the big city. Will his decency and his love for his fiance survive amidst the charms of the metropolis?

And yet the wanderer sometimes pulled up, and looked with dull astonishment down the endless rows of houses. They were precisely the same buildings which he had admired on his arrival a year before, the same shops, the same streets, only he had changed, a being who only accidentally bore his name, transformed, converted, bewitched, ruined by the wand of this cruel, inexorable, stony goddess - the city.

Georg Julius Leopold Engel (1866-1931) was a German author and dramatist whose works were banned and grave desecrated by the Nazis. A number of his novels were bestsellers, and some were adapted into movies during his own lifetime.