Film and underlying novel are loosely based on the true life story of Robert Michaelis, a German-Jewish judge at the Berlin district court in the early 1930s, who was no longer allowed to work in his profession due to the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 and fled to exile in Shanghai after the Nazi pogroms in 1938. When he returned to Germany in 1948 and began once again to work as a judge at the Mainz district court, his accounting of the crimes of National Socialism and the injustice against the Jews were massively hampered by former Nazis in leading positions.
Based on the novel with the same title by Ursula Krechel, awarded with the German Book Prize in 2012, known as the highest national honor for fictional literature in Germany.