Where our story takes place, only the chickens know what stress means. Otherwise, life in the countryside is quiet, so it's no wonder that the annual "stallion auction" is the highlight of cultural life—an event where the highest-bidding ladies can bid on a rendezvous with the most handsome young farmers.

Jochen's life is going well. He has just moved into a new house with his wife and child when suddenly his widowed father accidentally runs into a car and begins to lose his mind. The family take the old man in but tensions arise when the family has to grapple with the old father's worsening Alzheimer's condition.

Jonas is in his mid-twenties, still lives with his parents and gets dumped by his girlfriend. He soon gets to know Lena, a tough young woman with ideals, and immediately falls in love with her. However, to prove he is worthy of her love, he has to pass an endurance test.

A new chapter begins for Laura: Together with her parents and her brother Tommy, she moves to a new home. But at first the girl can't really get used to the new city and has difficulties making friends and socializing. One evening she watches a star fall from the sky. Laura rushes to the injured star's aid and takes care of him. The two become friends and the star takes Laura on many exciting adventures.

In the face of the bucket wheel excavators in the brown coal mining area eating their way through the muddy Rhineland soil, the Lange family is at a crossroads: what do we do when the old has to go and the new is so uncertain? The young entrepreneur Marcel Lange, hungry for success, wants to build a new high-end village and achieve social advancement. To this end, he has already had the prototype Villa Verena built on the edge of the open-cast mine, where the largest renaturalized lake in the world is to be created in just a few years. But his sister Franca is against it. In the old village, which is about to be demolished, she is holding the fort and tinkering in the basement on an electricity storage unit that will supply all the houses with green energy in the future and make them self-sufficient. In the midst of this chaos, widow and mother Angelika Lange has other plans. She wants to finally take a vacation with the relocation bonus and doesn't always want to worry about others.

Alex is a passionate musician. He travels from one gig to the next with his tango band. He can't make a living from his music, but he doesn't really care. This changes when he and his bandmates steal a rocker band's tour bus and there is an accident. Alex's friend Tommy dies and the tango band is finished. Suddenly Alex finds himself without an apartment, a pile of debts and with the grim rockers breathing down his neck. There's only one thing to do: go into hiding.

Aged hairdresser Hans Anton Schatz still lives at home with his mother and works in the small-town salon around the corner. He adores the florist Melanie, but she is engaged to a wild Ruhr proletarian. Shortly before the wedding, she is overcome with panic and persuades Hans Anton to take a bus trip to Berlin. Hans Anton blossoms in the big city and falls in love with an extroverted TV presenter, whom he pursues all the way to her show.

While searching for an ancient burial chamber in Cologne, Dr. Bea Valori has suppressed the fact that she is a very lonely romantic at heart. This seems to change when colleague Michael Burger introduces her to the charismatic Jürgen Wiedener. He teaches minnesong at the university and has very specific ideas about a life for two. At first, Bea feels flattered by Jürgen's declarations of love. But then his courtship becomes more and more insistent. He is prepared to give everything for Bea. Even if it costs him his life...

The story and fate of three families: A Jewish family destroyed by the massacres of the Nazis in Lithuania; the family of the culprit, who flew to America and keeps grotesque family cohesion; the family of Ratz, a social democratic family, dissolving itself miserably in today's Vienna. The condemnation of the last century bundled in these three families showing clearly that one could never escape from its own past. Written by themoth-1