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 Hahlstr m, 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.