Plot synopsis: The living conditions during the period of inflation in the early 1920s are depicted in a fascinating way. Behind a shiny façade, ordinary people struggle for bare survival. Opposite them stand landowners and former military personnel with their complacency, ignorance, and emptiness! The title character, Wolfgang Pagel—a cadet officer, unemployed and a gambler out of desperation—loses everything on the night before his wedding and sets out in search of money in the inflation-ridden Berlin of the 1920s.