During his apprenticeship, Bruno Melzer is still full of hope that he will one day be able to escape the mediocrity of his life. But his dream of becoming the architect of his own fortune proves to be a fragile utopia: He marries a casual acquaintance while she is expecting his child. When his wife falls ill with cancer and dies years later, Melzer suddenly has to bear the responsibility of raising three children alone.

Josef "Schmutz" (german for "dirt"), a security guard obsessed with duty and cleanliness, is given the task of guarding a decommissioned industrial plant. While maintaining his devotion to the authority of property right, the self-proclaimed "Representative of Ownership" is himself slowly losing his sense of reality.

This film, dramatizing Weininger's life, is an adaptation of the 1982 play Soul of a Jew by Israeli writer Joshua Sobol. Weininger's last despondent hours are depicted in a dramatic furioso. His whole life passes by like distorted images in a mirror. The young genius fights a desperate battle against time, his fellow men - and against himself.

A plot of land, a house by the lake, its changing inhabitants. This one plot of land reflects 70 years of German history from Weimar, the Nazis, the war, the Soviet occupation and reconstruction to the fall of the GDR.