In April 1999, Heinrich Breloer took Thomas Mann's daughter Elisabeth to her former parents' house in Munich. Only the ground floor of the villa remains in the form of an uninhabited bungalow. The 81-year-old, clever and humorous widow of the Italian literature and politics professor Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who died in 1952, remembers her childhood, her parents, siblings, uncle Heinrich and his wife Nelly. Elisabeth Mann Borgese's answers to Heinrich Breloer's questions hold the film together, which he assembled from earlier statements by other family members, memories of Thomas Mann's longtime secretary Hilde Kahn-Reach, original recordings and re-enacted scenes.