Maurizius, an elegant and frivolous man of letters, is framed for the murder of his wife and sentenced to life in prison at the request of prosecutor Wolf von Andergast after a controversial trial. Nineteen years later, Etzel Andergast, the fearsome prosecutor's teenage son, implores his father to reopen the Maurizius case. Although the young man is convinced of the defendant's innocence, the prosecutor Von Andergast refuses to accept the possibility of having made a mistake. This will force Etzel to confront his father, to question the traditional values ​​that he has instilled in him and to seek the truth on his own. Based on a famous miscarriage of justice, this critical and idealistic masterpiece has the grandeur of a Greek tragedy. Inspired by the moral and philosophical implications of the European crisis of the first half of the 20th century, Jacob Wassermann made one of the most passionate denunciations of the injustice and cruelty of bourgeois society in the last century.