"And between the night's rise and fall, the hourly chimes of human existence swing in a quite narrow space. Their tone is eternal desire in miserable struggle and bitterest sweetness." Two souls come together in an inauspicious marriage and struggle towards their intertwined fates. Hermann Stehr (1864-1940) was a Silesian author of over thirty novels and novellas. He was awarded the Bauernfeld Prize (1910), the Fastenrath Prize (1919), the Schiller Prize (1919), the Rathenau Prize (1930), the Wartburg Rose (1932), the Goethe Medal for Art and Science (1932) and the Goethe Prize of Frankfurt-am-Main (1933), and appointed as a founding member of the Prussian Literary Academy (1926).