Gisela is a young wife and mother, living in a working class German Housing Scheme. She is a supermarket cashier, her husband a delivery driver. The marriage is stale but together they are working their way up into the middle class. George and Gisela evidently knew each other as teenagers. They live on the same scheme and George introduces her to his friend Paul. There is instant mutual attraction. Gisela spontaneously goes to a party that they invite her to that evening, where she and Paul begin a sexual relationship.

An obsessed hacker escapes and hides in empty apartments after his girlfriend dies of an overdose in his apartment, but he cannot control his obsession with breaking into others' homes.

Noticing Marie's devastation after her boyfriend, Paul, dumps her, call boy Theo tries to help, and their friendship soon grows deeper, touching a part of Theo he's frozen in order to service his male clients. When Paul returns, however, his presence threatens this fragile new union.

An extreme athlete falls while climbing and ends up living with a doctor who performs surgery on himself. He turns out to be an alcoholic who loses his medical license shortly thereafter. In her attempt to help him overcome his addiction, she loses touch with her friends.

It is the time of the 1994 World Cup. Günther Schmidt has no friends. Dull he pursues his profession, drinks his beer in the evening in the pub. The feeling of success he only experiences on the weekend when he wins in the model boat competition. The trophies then decorate his small, always dark ground floor apartment in Berlin-Neukölln. His membership with the Republicans shows him as a racist skewer, and he sinks ever deeper into inertia and dullness. When one day Franziska comes to the pub where he is watching a World Cup broadcast, it seems to have come to an end with his loneliness. Günther Schmidt, awakened by the superiority of feelings, wants to prove itself - wants to prove to her - that he is someone...

In 1980s East Germany, Berlin doctor Barbara is banished to a country medical clinic for applying for an exit visa. Deeply unhappy with her reassignment and fearful of her co-workers as possible Stasi informants, Barbara stays aloof, especially from the good-natured clinic head, Andre.