"Goethe, my friend, I beg you: Fight this enemy!" Privy Councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was expecting a lot when he was summoned to the ducal palace one February morning in 1805. However, if he had known that Prince Karl August had chosen him to overthrow Napoleon, he would probably have preferred to stay at home. Instead, a short time later, he finds himself on his way to French-occupied Mainz, accompanied by his friend Friedrich von Schiller and the travel-experienced Alexander von Humboldt, in order to free the true King of France. But the mission is far more tricky than expected. One after the other, the Bonapartists, the Royalists and the Romantics get in his way, and the journey becomes a deadly chase across Germany deep into the bosom of the Kyffhäuser.