Menschen im Rausch

Summary

The velvet curtain falls, champagne flutes still fizz, and Berlin’s nocturne begins to pulse. Professor Munk—laurelled maestro, darling of critics, husband to porcelain virtue—exits the opera house gilded in applause, only to collide with Asta, a street-siren whose gaze strips pretense faster than her fingers strip wallets. One whiff of her violet-soaked skin and the composer’s life pivots on a dissonant chord: he abandons wife, child, and respectability, plunging into the Tingeltangel’s smoky underworld where sopranos grind against trumpets and respectability is a joke told in broken lipstick. Asta, half-muse, half-parasite, scales the social ladder using Munk’s fame as rungs—each kiss a notch higher, each betrayal a darker spotlight—while the maestro, drunk on lust and absinthe, trades symphonies for sleaze, baton for bowler, dignity for greasepaint. As her star ascends, his liver, credit, and sanity hemorrhage; the man who once conjured cathedrals of sound now scrapes together foxtrots for drunken sailors. The final cadence: Asta on a hotel balcony, pearls gleaming like extracted teeth, Munk below in the gutter, humming the overture he will never finish, a cigarette ember the last timpani roll of a life reduced to ash.

Synopsis

Professor Munk is a respected and successful composer. After a premiere, he meets the beautiful and unscrupulous whore Asta on the street and falls completely in love with her. He leaves his wife and child for her, performs with her at the Tingeltangel, and does not realize that she is only taking advantage of his wealth and fame. And while Asta keeps climbing, Munk's unstoppable downfall begins.