The play is set in a painter's studio, where we find Nobel Prize author Wolfgang Schwitter, who has died and come back to life, as he will a second time in the course of the play. Declared clinically dead, Wolfgang Schwitter has fled the hospital, with its doctors and gadgets, to Nyffenschwander's studio, where years before he had begun his literary career and where he now wants to die, yet cannot. He vehemently protests against his own resurrection, requesting the death he is as entitled to as anyone else. Visitors begin to enter the studio, and one by one, in one way or another, they are all destroyed: the minister, the painter, his wife, a building contractor, his personal physician, and his mother-in-law. All of them have more or less accidentally entered the paradoxically deadly sphere of Schwitter's resurrection; they happen to interrupt his dying and die themselves. In the end, Schwitter finds himself utterly alone. As the Salvation Army glorifies him in a psalm of resurrection, he realises in horror that his desperate quest for death will go on.