Internees at the "model" ghetto included those over the age of 60, World War I veterans, and prominent cultural figures; the majority came from occupied Czechoslovakia. The ghetto's purpose was essentially to provide a smokescreen - as the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded in other camps throughout central and eastern Europe, the Nazis could display Theresienstadt to address international concern. Initially, the internees had hoped that the camp's special status would exempt it from the kind of conditions that plagued other Nazi concentration camps, including overcrowding, disease, and deportation, but these hopes were soon dispelled. The first deportation took place in January 1942; epidemics gripped the camp, and the population of a town that previously had held around 3,500 people soon climbed to a high of more than 50,000 in September 1942. On July 23, 1944, with word spreading of what was happening to Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe, the International Red Cross visited Theresienstadt. The ghetto was beautified, and internees were coached on how to respond to Red Cross representatives. After the visit, the Nazis made a propaganda film to show how the internees were "leading a new life under the protection of the Führer." By October, mass deportations to Auschwitz had begun.

Viktor Ullmann arrived in Theresien-stadt with his wife Elisabeth on September 8, 1942. He already had a long and distinguished career as a composer and music journalist behind him. He had studied with Arnold Schoenberg in Vienna, and his Variations and Double Fugue on a theme from his teacher's piano piece Op. 19, No. 4, introduced Ullmann to an international audience when Franz Langer performed the work at the International Society of Contemporary Music congress in Geneva in 1929. An orchestral version of the Variations received the prestigious Emil Hretzka prize in 1934, beating out works by composers such as Luigi Dallapiccola and Paul Dessau, and Ullmann's opera Der Sturz des Antichrist (The Fall of the Antichrist), which has many themes and concerns in common with Der Kaiser von Atlantis (The Emperor of Atlantis), won the prize again two years later. In spite of these successes, Ullmann's situation in Prague became increasingly precarious in the late 1930s - he was unable to secure performances for his music, including Der Sturz des Antichrist, and he had to eke out a living as a critic for the German-language music journal Der Auftakt (The Upbeat) and from whatever work he could find lecturing and teaching. He contacted friends about emigrating to Switzerland or South Africa after the Nazis annexed Czechoslovakia (1938-39), but they advised him to stay in Prague, advice that brought Ullmann to Theresienstadt.

During his two years in the camp, Ullmann composed an impressive amount of music - several songs and a capella choruses as well as a string quartet, three piano sonatas, a setting of Rilke's Die weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (The Way of Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke) for narrator and orchestra, and the present work, the opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis. Paradoxically, internment liberated Ullmann creatively in a way that had been impossible outside of the camp. According to a critical essay written by the composer during his time in the camp: "Theresienstadt was and is for me the school of form. Earlier, when one did not feel the impact and burden of material life because they were obscured by comfort, this magical feat of civilization, it was easy to create beautiful forms. Here, where one has to triumph over the matter of daily life through form, where all things connected with the Muses stand in utter contrast to the surroundings, here is the true school for masters, if one, with Schiller, sees the secret of the work of art in the annihilation of matter through form, which, presumably, is the overall mission of man, not only of the aesthetic man, but of the ethical man…. It must be emphasized that Theresienstadt has increased, not reduced, my musical work, that by no means did we sit weeping at the rivers of Babylon, and that our desire for culture equaled our desire for life; and I am convinced that all those who, in life and in art, struggled to force form upon resisting matter, will agree with me."

Viktor Ullmann - Composer

In November 1941, the first Jews arrived in Theresienstadt (Terezín in Czech), a ghetto established by the Nazis as "a model Jewish settlement." The city dated back to 1780, when the Hapsburg Emperor Joseph II founded it as a fortress to protect his eastern lands from Turkish invaders. Joseph, known as a reformer, was a ruler steeped in the values of the Enlightenment whose decrees had an impact on many of his subjects, including Jews, who gained new freedoms with regard to movement, employment, and education. He named the outpost after his mother, Maria Theresa, whose own reforms laid the groundwork for her son's.