Summary
In the flickering twilight of a nation still smelling of gunpowder, a resolute woman—Henny Porten’s gaunt, luminous face carved by lantern-glow—traverses rubble-strewn boulevards where yesterday’s imperial eagles lie beheaded. She shelters a mutinous printer (Erich Kaiser-Titz) whose pamphlets scream for a republic, while her aging father, a magistrate who once sworn by the Kaiser’s shadow, clings to the crumbling bench like a barnacle to a sinking frigate. Around them, demobbed soldiers swap medals for potatoes, cabarets birth anarchist waltzes, and a clandestine countess photographs secret police for blackmail. When the printer’s type is smashed by monarchist saboteurs, Porten’s heroine barters her heirloom pearls for a defiant new press, typesetting through the night until her fingertips bleed into the ink, turning her body itself into the printing plate of revolution. A climactic ink-blackened handshake between the ex-Kaiser’s general and the printer—engineered by the magistrate who finally chooses conscience over crown—becomes the fragile dawn after which the film is named. Yet the closing shot withholds sun: instead we get a horizon of smokestacks and scaffoldings, suggesting history’s scaffolding is forever unfinished.
