A depressed entertainer wants to conquer the stages of the world. He has only one problem: no one knows him. His ambitious sister wants to change that. She organizes a film crew to record his glamorous rise, but instead deep abysses reveal themselves behind the facade.

Plum out of luck, Swabian farmer Huber’s farm goes under. Then his girlfriend Birgit takes over her father’s newly-acquired firm – in former East Germany. That's reason enough for Huber to bail on his debts and head out on a road trip through southwest Germany.

Across generations, a single instrument connects people from different eras - from an emigrating zither player in the Bavarian Forest in 1881, to the persecuted and the lovers of the 20th century, to a deaf young woman in present-day Munich - weaving them into a polyphonic, musical hymn to memory, loss, and solidarity.