A strange green cloud has turned almost the entire human race into stone. The only survivors are eight children, their intrepid teacher Birnenstiel and his friend, a jolly millionaire, who by chance all happen to be in an airship above the green cloud at the time. Against this background Birnenstiel tells a bizarre adventure story in which he and the children are heroes. With loving and pointed irony he confronts his protagonists with deep-frozen beauty queens, gene-manipulated tomatoes, extraterrestrial maniacs, aggressive goldfish and last but not least the rampant mechanics of an abandoned civilisation which claims its victims one by one. When the narrator goes too far, the children take the story into their own hands...

Johanna, a librarian who was recently abandoned by her partner, has stopped her car at a railroad crossing to end her life. She caught her boyfriend in the act—with her best friend, of all people. Car mechanic Uwe shares Johanna's fate; he has been left by his career-obsessed girlfriend Sabine, who suddenly decided he wasn't good enough for her anymore. At the last second, Uwe manages to intervene and save Johanna, but in doing so, he almost wrecks his Opel Kadett. Johanna is first taken to a mental hospital, where her uncle is already staying. The elderly gentleman is a little crazy, but quite lovable. Convinced that he is a knight from the 13th century, he wants to do everything he can to reunite with Johanna's deceased mother Anneliese. He is firmly convinced that he can do this if he finds the time hole that opens every seven years on the Großglockner.