At the beginning of the turbulent 1920s, Luise Schilling leaves her father's conservative household in Berlin for Weimar's Bauhaus university, with dreams of studying architecture. When she arrives and encounters a fractured social world of mystics and formalists, communists and fascists, the dichotomy between the rigid past and a hopeful future turns out to be a lot more muddled than she thought. A young woman's dispatch from a past culture war that rings all too familiar.