It has a frame story about a man who enters the world of theatre, but the book mainly consists of phantasmagorical tales and allegories concerning art, alienation and German identity.

[1] Leon Pracht, a young man, abandons a budding career in the footsteps of his father—a historian of religion specialised on Montanus—after the positive reception of his debut as a theatre director.

He is recruited for an adaptation of Jean Genet's The Maids in Cologne, starring the two diva actresses Petra "Pat" Kurzrok and Margarethe "Mag" Wirth.

At a terrace behind the castle, a number of people are gathered: the paramedic Reppenfries, his sister-in-law Paula and wife Dagmar, the beautiful Almut, the "modern" Hanswerner, the mail clerk Yossica, and the narrator, Leon.

As Ossia—the name he has become known under also in private—he brilliantly captures the German national character, playing a Prussian vagabond described in the press as a mix between Parsifal and Paracelsus.

Ossia hands him notes to read and starts to explain the project, intended as a vehicle for Pat in a great female comedic role, but the film lacks structure and Leon disapproves of it.

The critic wrote that some of the stories "include unsettling surreal touches", but that most of them "are heavier-than-air fantasies that tend to revolve around the usual postmodern problems of alienated intellectuals, cultural collisions and consumer dystopias".