After a considerable period of unemployment, 24-year-old Joseph Marti is offered a position as a clerk in the technical office of the engineer and inventor C. Tobler, of Bärenswil. Tobler has invested his entire fortune in inventions that have failed to attract anyone's attention. In addition to taking dictation of what are for the most part high-flown pleas for assistance, Marti's duties include a range of household chores and services to his master's family. To this end he is given the tower chamber as his digs, where he spends his leisure time cursing his fate, developing his skills of resistance and rebellion and rehearsing in his mind the shy, confused moments he has spent with the young Mrs Tobler.
The viewer is drawn into the slow fall of the house of Tobler, into the pointlessly lavish round of parties, and suffers along with the assistant as he is subjected to a series of brutal psychodramas by Tobler, who is in the process of being mentally outstripped by his employee. There is also the hint of an erotic relationship, which serves Joseph as an excuse to make reproaches of maternal neglect.
As Tobler's bankruptcy grows ever more inevitable, his clerk takes on more and more of the characteristics of a household servant, receiving from his insolvent and dishonest master a weekly allowance instead of a proper salary.
After a half year in Tobler's service, Marti resigns. He leaves the ruined Villa zum Abendstern on New Year's morning, taking with him the repressed emotions of Mrs Tobler's farewell. And with that the assistant is thrown back upon his uncertain, dislocated existence, longing for a sense of belonging and a connection to his own kind.
