Germany, Summer, 2022. Of the most important German systematic philosopher in the history of Western philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, we seemed to know everything and even more by now. But something unexpected happens. Klaus Vieweg, biographer and influential scholar of Hegelian philosophy, discovers in an archive ancient manuscripts forgotten because they were not properly catalogued... Beyond the dust lies wonder!
Heidelberg, 1816-18. Friedrich Wilhelm Carové is the first young assistant to a promising professor who needs help explaining his complicated philosophical-scientific system to his students. Carové joined him and tried to make his ideas understandable to his audience of brilliant minds, including Frenchman Victor Cousin. Meanwhile, Carové stands out as the leader of the most inclusive and diversity-friendly student association, that of the so-called philosophers or Hegelians.
London, 1834. Sarah Austin is a brilliant translator. She threw herself headlong into translating the famous report on the state of public education in Prussia, addressed by Victor Cousin to Marthe-Camille Bachasson, Count of Montalivet, French Minister of Public Education. Cousin directs Sarah's attention to a fairy tale written by his friend from his Heidelberg days: Carové. It will be first of all Lucie, Sarah's little daughter, who will be passionate about this fairy tale and will ask her mother to read it again and again, to the point that she will induce her to translate it into English so that many other children can hear it. Lucie, a few years later, will follow in her mother's footsteps by becoming a translator of German works and so will her daughter. The story without an End, which Sarah Austin had translated into English for Lucie, became a classic of children's literature in England and the United States.
The film is the story of an interweaving of present and past, of philosophy and translation, of political and social claims, and of generations. It all starts with an extraordinary and unexpected finding that occurred in the present day that will shed new light on Hegel's thought in every area of his encyclopedic system. But it is also an original visual tale about the interweaving of distant lives, joined together by curiosity, passion and freedom: a story without end.