Der Uhrmacher des Zaren

St. Petersburg 1827: The young watchmaker Heinrich Moser (1805–1874) from Schaffhausen achieves the coup of his life. He is the only one able to repair the Tsar's favorite watch. This makes him famous and incredibly wealthy. Not only does the Russian nobility place orders with him, but his watch empire soon extends far beyond the borders of Russia. Moser uses his fabulous fortune, upon returning to Switzerland, to promote the industrialization of his hometown.

However, his personal life is marked by misfortune: his beloved wife Charlotte dies, and he has bitter disputes with his son Henri. Instead of taking over the family business, Henri travels through the Asian steppes, becoming a researcher and collector, and time and again, money slips through his fingers.

The father remarries, taking a very young baroness as his wife, which dramatically increases tensions within the family and leads to a rift between father and son. Henri's stepsister Mentona, on the other hand, is indifferent to the immense wealth. She dedicates herself to the socially disadvantaged, becomes a communist and women's rights activist, goes to the young Soviet Union, and returns a large part of the Moser fortune to where it all began.

In 1969, Heinrich Moser's great-grandson receives a package containing letters, photographs, and documents: Fifty years later, the spectacular family saga is now presented, a novel that only life could write.