The emotional death of an oversexed society. No one helps anybody else. But then, shortly before Basti attempts to commit suicide, before he jumps from Vienna's Reichsbrücke into the notoriously gluttonous Danube, something happens between the two young protagonists. Basti and Claudia meet on the bridge. Two bungee jumpers without a cord. They both recognize themselves in the other's life, between reform school and the family's butcher shop, between child abuse and games that involve getting tied up.

Ingo Hasselbach, whose parents were Communist Party members in East Germany during his childhood, has lived at both ends of the political seesaw. The question of how people reach a change of heart is a profound one; Hasselbach describes the external forces that led to his founding Germany's first neo-Nazi political party and the internal ones that led him away from it five years later.

The dull daily routine of an insurance agent, who listlessly drives down the highway every day and conducts customer meetings while longing for his family, becomes a metaphor for a life that has come to a standstill and is threatened with being crushed by loneliness.

Three young men, all of them outsiders, become friends: Richy (16), who is teased at school, Tim (16), who has moved from the west with his parents and has difficulties getting used to his new life, and Marco (18), who has problems coping with his parents' separation and the rejection he experiences from his father. Richy admires the strong and uncommunicative Marco.

Preoccupied with her virginity, which distinguishes her from her peers, 17-year-old Saskia secretly dreams of dating Christophe, the star of the school and a musician to boot. As she is new to love, her fairy godmother takes the form of Hannes, a new gay neighbor, and sets about educating her. But Hannes also falls under Christophe's spell.

After Helma is lured into an abandoned villa by the voice of her boyfriend Philipp and brutally murdered there, his friends and family hold him responsible for Helma's death—and for further deaths. But the truth is quite different, because: The "Gonger" is back!

When German police viciously quell a protest against the shah of Iran, popular journalist Ulrike Meinhof rebels against her dishonest marriage, walks away from her children and joins radical anarchist Andreas Baader. Together with Baader's girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin, they form the violent Red Faction Army, and together perpetrate a slew of terrorist attacks as a way of disrupting the fabric of what they see as an increasingly fascist state.

In 1929 music teacher Paul Leinert receives an unexpected letter from his old friend Otto Schiffmann, a young and talented composer who has moved away from Berlin after a failed marriage. The letter is an invitation for Paul to come and visit Otto in his forest cabin – and to become familiar with his new work, a long-awaited symphony. Taking along his wife Anna together with his colleague Willi, the three find Otto’s cabin but their host is nowhere to be seen. As they go looking for him, Paul notices something odd about the song of the local birds...