Weimar Germany's final year plays out in Berlin, where a collapsing economy and a paralyzed Reichstag leave the government unable to govern by normal means. Drawing on personal diaries and letters from Berliners who lived through it, the film tracks the backroom deals among Chancellor Franz von Papen, President Hindenburg's inner circle, and a Nazi party maneuvering for power through legal channels and street violence in parallel. Archival footage and expert historians walk through the sequence of elections and cabinet collapses that hollowed out the republic month by month, culminating in the Reichstag Fire and the emergency decrees that followed. Rather than treating Hitler's rise as inevitable, the film lays out the specific choices, miscalculations, and compromises made by conservative elites who thought they could control him. Street battles between paramilitaries, unemployment lines, and newspaper headlines from the period ground the political history in what ordinary Berliners actually saw and felt as their democracy dissolved around them.