The hero of the film, violinist Helmut Stern born in Berlin in 1928. “I lived under five dictatorships. The first was German, Hitler’s, the second was Japanese in China, the third was Soviet in China, the fourth was Chinese communist, because there was already a civil war and we had communists, and the fifth... guess... These are the conductors", he says. The story of Helmut Stern, his forced trip around the world, his odyssey of a Jewish refugee recalls the story of Voltaire's Candide, who was expelled from his home. Life made him a cosmopolitan and democrat.

The main thing for a real writer and his readers is texts. A biography is a less significant thing. Most readers of Don Quixote do not know the biography of Cervantes and do not particularly need it. But sometimes the biography of a writer can become an explanation for the incident of a genius who turned out to be unnecessary or unidentified, unrecognized. This is precisely the case of Friedrich Gorenstein, the author of Andrey Rublev's monologues in Tarkovsky's film and the screenwriter of his own "Solaris", the author of the dialogues in Konchalovsky's film "The First Teacher" and co-author with him of the script for the film "Slave of Love". Andrei Tarkovsky and Benedikt Sarnov, Naum Korzhavin and Vyacheslav Ivanov have called and continue to call his books brilliant. Gorenstein has lived in Berlin for the last 20 years. Benedikt Sarnov, Andrey Konchalovsky, Mark Rozovsky, Leonid Kheifets, Vladimir Voinovich, Andrey Bitov, Boris Khazanov, Mikhail Levitin, Natalya Ivanova, Viktor Erofeev, Evgeny Popov and others remember and talk about Gorenstein on the screen. The film also includes archival video recordings of interviews with Gorenstein.

The Gorenstein Worlds educational project