Promiscuous, pitiless, and bored, six sexually-entangled medical students restlessly wander in and out of a boarding house, cramming, drinking, taunting, spying. Freder sets about savagely experimenting with the pretty young maid, with half an eye on his former lover Desiree, a wild, disillusioned aristocrat. Petrell abandons Marie for ruthless underdog Irene. Marie doesn't waste any time weeping: Desiree wants her. Bourgeois existence or suicide; there are no other choices in 1923 Vienna. A discontented post-war generation diagnoses youth to be their sickness and does their best to destroy it.