The year is 1921. A young scholar, unable to cope with the turmoil unleashed by a devastating family tragedy, flees to a war-ravaged Germany in the vain hope he might find tranquility hidden away in the archives of an abandoned university. There he encounters a former biology professor, still living within the bowels of the shuttered campus. The old man is also one of the few remaining followers of Monism. a once-popular German philosophic movement that advocated the integration of science and religion in a new form of faith, a faith in the power of science to unveil the grandeur of God embodied in the beauty of our natural world. The old man’s dream is to restore the crushed German spirit by creating the most inspiring symbol of scientific power that he can conceive. But the result is a travesty and the consequences are harrowing for the university town, and for the entire German nation. And the young man's part in the debacle becomes a burden of guilt he carries for the rest of his life.