The hero of the film, violinist Helmut Stern born in Berlin in 1928. “I lived under five dictatorships. The first was German, Hitler’s, the second was Japanese in China, the third was Soviet in China, the fourth was Chinese communist, because there was already a civil war and we had communists, and the fifth... guess... These are the conductors", he says. The story of Helmut Stern, his forced trip around the world, his odyssey of a Jewish refugee recalls the story of Voltaire's Candide, who was expelled from his home. Life made him a cosmopolitan and democrat.