Lorenz Ferleitner has worked his way up from a poor but gifted farm boy to a recognized master builder. When a new cathedral is to be built, he is given the honor of carrying out the task. He would like to commission the unknown young painter Fritz Rasmussen to decorate the dome. The director of the art academy, Professor Marquardt, however, wants to employ his untalented nephew for the painting work. A bitter conflict unfolds.
A beautiful woman of the Latin Quarter, marries a rich cattle owner Pedro Maurez from South America to live in peace and happiness. The arrival of young Parisian Paul Durand wets her interest again in the old haunts of Paris. When her husband is slain in an uprising of laborers, she is again thrown on her own resources.
The director and co-writer Lupu Pick plays musician Erik Paulsson, who loses his beloved son after a peaceful yet critical poetry reading is raided by the tsarist forces. Paulsson, beside himself with grief, kills the officer responsible and is sentenced to life, which will mean 18 years in prison before he is free again. While he is inside, by a strange quirk of fate, his daughter Karin falls in love with writer Sebald Brückner, the son of the state prosecutor, who indicted Paulsson and is a staunch advocate of the death penalty. The conflict between the fathers does not impair the relationship of the young couple. However, when Sebald’s long-desired success on the stage is threatened by a vengeful theatre director who had sexually harassed Karin, he is enraged and kills the other man in a fight. The prosecutor now must face the blow of losing his own son to the death penalty.