Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.

In Greece at the time of antiquity. In the year 600 before Christ, the 45th Olympic Games are held, which are all in the sign of the old city-renown Sparta-Athens.

Vera Romeyke is an idealistic and committed teacher who tries to interest her pupils in the subject matter with new forms of teaching. In role-playing games, they are encouraged to reflect on their own lives and those of their parents and learn to question social conventions. The conservative parents fear that this project is aimed at "left-wing indoctrination". They turn to the school authorities, who eventually transfer Vera Romeyke.

A Jewish boy separated from his family in the early days of WWII poses as a German orphan and is taken into the heart of the Nazi world as a 'war hero' and eventually becomes a Hitler Youth.