We see the young officer cadet "Heinrich" at his commissioning, we see the music making young man, already bewildered by the Prussian military service, we see the enthusiastic man, full of animosity against the French, we take part at the difficulties of a continual petitioner - for money, for a job, for an audience with the poet-prince Goethe -, we find him as a in the forest, lovingly together with Ernst von Pfuel, the so-called "little curly head...", and, on the other hand, he is incestuously fond of his half-sister Ulrike in love with his "Penthesilea", a girl who prefers men's trousers to skirts. Finally, the suicide of the 34-year-old poet along with his understanding friend Henriette Vogel, his "angel of death".

Life and Death of the German poet Heinrich von Kleist, not told chronologically but in a faceted and fragmentary form.