Berlin, an old apartment building between the S-Bahn and the street. Seventeen people live there. The old photographer Kempinski, shrouded in his memories. Hannelore, dreaming of distant lands, temporarily sharing her apartment with her lovesick niece. Bona, who occasionally drinks a beer with his roommate and teaches French in the kitchen. The two teenage sisters with their newly in love mom. The medieval caretaker couple and the young couple whose daughter Paula would rather sit in the stairwell than go to school. On the face of it, they all have nothing in common apart from their home address. The film tells in microscopically accurate, realistic visual language and on changing levels of the common everyday life of small people.

In Germany, an old man attacks another old man and is arrested. The attacker refuses to speak. A female lawyer is appointed to him. She discovers that the attacker has numbers tattooed on his arm and the attacked man was a German officer.

An American judge in Germany must decide if the hijacking of an East German plane into West Berlin was justified.