The film's sets were designed by the art directors Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig.

[1] It is inspired by the 1832 novel Colonel Chabert by Honoré de Balzac, updated to the modern era with the setting shifted from Restoration France to Weimar Germany.

He is really a former German soldier who suffered memory loss after being wounded on the Eastern Front during the First World War.

After sixteen year's absence he returns to Berlin but discovers that his wife had him declared dead in 1921 and that the manufacturing company he owned is controlled by another man.

With no legal existence in the eyes of the authorities, and shunned by those who don't recognise him, as a "man without a name", he contemplates suicide.