The time from 1895 to 1945, the Berlin of Zille and Otto Reutter, Claire Waldoff, the imperial parades and marches under the Brandenburg Gate; the two world wars, the lavish premieres in the Apollo Theatre and small, intimate rounds in the country, and Walter Kollo's music, that comes to life in the feature film that Willi Kollo, also a highly successful pop composer and text writer, dedicated to his famous father in 1958. He cleverly combined the biographical report with a storyline and historical newsreel excerpts and linked the atmosphere of the past and the present. In this historically valuable archive material from the turn of the century to the time of inflation, we see and hear once again Wilhelm II, Hindenburg, Gustav Stresemann, Friedrich Ebert, Klara Zetkin, Philipp Scheidemann, Gerhard Hauptmann, Heinrich Zille, Claire Waldoff, Max Reinhardt, and the cab driver Gustav Hartmann (alias the "iron Gustav"), Josephine Baker and countless other contemporaries of this turbulent century.