72 years old Martha Jellneck lives alone in a small apartment in Hamburg. Since she's hampered in walking, she never leaves her home. Her only contacts to the outside world are the young social worker Thomas and a neighbor boy who walks her dog. When Thomas tells her one day that Franz Laub, another one of his clients, has his birthday, she becomes suspicious: that was also her half-brother's name and day of birth - only that he died in WW2...

Ironies abound in this extremely sad melodrama about Elif, a Turkish immigrant in Germany who has been sent to prison for murdering her abusive husband. At the time of her imprisonment, she has never ventured outside the Turkish community, and even there has had no friends because of the demands her husband placed on her. She speaks no German. Now, in a place which most people find to be hell on earth, she gains a never-before known taste of freedom among these strangers, who don't even speak her own language. Unfortunately, as a "guest worker," she is horrified to discover that she is soon to be transferred to the horrific prisons of Turkey and will stand trial there for her crime, which will be much less understandingly dealt with in her home country than it would have been in Germany. The false paradise she must say goodbye to is her German prison.

The harmless Berlin taxi driver Herbert Boeckmann has a bad day: Three mysterious gentlemen put the corpse of Boris Stravinsky, a Russian economist, into the car. Unsuspecting Herbert brings the "passenger" to East Berlin. There Boeckmann falls into the clutches of the KGB, who considers him a top agent of the CIA. As Herbert eventually returns to the western part of the city, the CIA waiting for him to be the taxi driver again suspected of being a top agent of the KGB. To prove his innocence, Herbert must find the real killer of Stravinsky. Herbert is given mysterious vials to which he sniffs in extreme situations, helping them not only to amazing powers and unsuspected abilities. As Super Agent "Herbie Melbourne" mixed Herbert on the agent scene. But between the lines he gets in the line of professional killer.

The film is based on the memoirs of Hamburg burglar Julius Adolf Petersen (1882-1933), who became famous as "Lord of Barmbeck". Petersen owed his status as a folk hero to the fact that he did not use any physical violence during his raids and only stole from rich people. After several times escaping, Petersen was finally sentenced to a long prison term. With no prospect of release, he took his own life in 1933.

During the final days of the First World War, Officer Menis does his duty in defending the battle flag of the defeated Austro-Hungarian empire, while his fellow troops, a motley gang recruited from several different countries not loyal to the royal family, simply try to survive by any means possible.

When a squatted house in Hamburg is evicted, Else, a well-known vagrant, also has to look for a new place to live. Having separated from her family at a very early age and bequeathed part of her fortune to poor orphans in India, she makes her way to her sister, the owner of the house, and is forced to watch a failed bank robbery. The two gangsters, who fear Else's testimony and therefore take her into their power, devise a plan to accompany her and get their hands on her sister's fortune.

At night, a violent confrontation between a pimp and a Greek guest worker takes place on Hamburg's Reeperbahn, resulting in the latter's death. In the subsequent trial before a jury, contradictory statements make it difficult to decide whether this was an intentional act or an accident.

In this docudrama, police in the countryside near Berlin attempt to trick a confession out of a Polish guest worker for the 1927 murder of an eight-year-old girl.