Set on a single day in 1927, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters — some historic, some invented — crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. The subjects include Robert Musil, Otto Dix, Werner Heisenberg, Anita Berber, Vladimir Nabokov, Käthe Kollwitz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Rosa Luxemburg — as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier, a murderer, a prostitute, a pickpocket, and several ghosts.

Drawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich's painting by the same name, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable.