• When is a man a man?
• Love & Agony

Former soldier Eugen Hinkemann returns from the war disabled: a war wound has cost him his genitalia, and with it his self-esteem and his place in society. He struggles not only with the rejection of his environment, but also with the despair of his marriage and his own inner emptiness. When he finally has to hire himself out as an attraction at a fair, where he tears raw meat apart with his teeth, his personal fate becomes a bitter indictment of a society that betrays its heroes and loses its humanity.

Strength and bravery, rationality and discipline, work and career. These classic male attributes were long considered the image of a man. In their role as the family provider and shaped by patriotism and honour, there was little room for sensitivity or weakness in the traditional understanding of the role of a man. In the aftermath of the First World War, old gender roles began to falter; women had increasingly taken on gainful employment during the war, and the loss of physical functions, as in the case of war injuries, often also meant the loss of male identity. In his tragedy, the German writer and politician Ernst Toller wrote about a time when the contrasts between traditional role perceptions and new social challenges led to a transitional period in which the definition of masculinity slowly began to change – a process that was to last for decades.