This adapation of a novel by Thomas Mann recounts the story of a bourgeois widow and her daughter who travel to Weimar in the year 1816 and take lodgings at a local inn. There, a knowledgable young waiter identifies the widow Charlotte as "Lotte" from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther and duly spreads the news of his find across the German state. A bevy of visitors descend upon the woman and prepare her for a meeting with the great poet himself. This encounter, however, takes an unexpected course as the small world of Charlotte and the big, cosmopolitan world of Goethe turn out no longer to have any points of contact.