Lola receives a phone call from her boyfriend Manni. He lost 100,000 DM in a subway train that belongs to a very bad guy. She has 20 minutes to raise this amount and meet Manni. Otherwise, he will rob a store to get the money. Three different alternatives may happen depending on some minor event along Lola's run.

Post-war Germany in 1946 while people are struggling to make ends meet, the film follows Hermann, a war veteran who finds employment at a train station. As he falls in love with an agricultural worker and starts comitting thefts, his fragile psyche seems to fall more and more out of balance.

Mara, a withdrawn and solitary artist, has to spend Christmas with her mother, who decided to move in with her after a long term hospitalization. The two women try to reunite as suddenly suppressed memories start to come alive again.

A young actress in Cold War Berlin struggles to decide whether or not to accept a new role, working with an old leftist director in a deserted theatrehouse. Caught between her painful childhood - loss of the mother - and the confusing and instable present political and social situation, she engages with prostitutes, penniless playwrights and postmen of the split Berlin city.

Philip, Max, and Julia Rossmann are brothers and sister. Out of their own life, they try to continue childhood bonds. Through their entanglement in a mysterious event, the three are torn apart. For each, a new beginning. The film begins a year later. Quite impulsively, Philip Rossmann leaves his hide-out to go and look for his lost brother. He meets former friends with whose help he tries to reconstruct his brother's trail. Despite the setbacks his research brings, he is able to track down his brother. They meet.

Set on the deserted North Sea island of Langeness, a lonely woman begins an affair with a stranger; only after he is identified as a political fugitive and deported does she begin to learn about his true identity and his past.