After rehab, Manfred Burger seems to have got his alcohol addiction under control and is trying to reorganize his life. Although he is now sober, he soon realizes that society cannot cope with his illness: His relationship with his wife Eva is on its last legs and he loses his job. Nobody seems to understand Burger and his illness. As his life continues to go off track, the bottle soon becomes his daily companion again...

In this grim German drama, a troubled 14-year-old boy's pent-up rage and frustration leads him to involvement with a bad crowd and gets him caught up in an inescapable spiral of increasingly self-destructive and deadly violence.

Five friends go to a ski lodge on Christmas Eve in a good mood to spend the Christmas vacations together. At the same time, three gangsters attack a department store - the robbery ends in disaster. The three perpetrators manage to escape, but one of them is badly injured. Unfortunate coincidences drive the gangsters into the friends' ski lodge, where Christmas Eve turns out to be less than harmonious...