A mature, rich and bored woman called Elisabeth is taking a ride with the “Rheingold”, a first-class high-speed train of the seventies along the river Rhine. In the train she is meeting her old school mate and lover who is working as a waiter and falls in love with him again. Her husband, a busy politician, realizes what’s going on and tries to catch the train to face his wife and her lover in a fatal showdown.

A middle-aged man's doubts about himself transform themselves into paranoia about his younger wife's behavior in this psychological thriller. The husband plants listening devices around their apartment and eventually drives the heretofore innocent woman into the arms of one of his co-workers.

The intellectual Willie flees from his bourgeois-academic environment, leaving behind his wife, child, and job to lead a vagabond life. In Vienna, he meets the retired laborer Josef, who becomes his closest friend. Together, they drink and roam the city. Willie makes one last attempt to visit his ex-wife in Salzburg, but she turns him away. Secretly, he takes his son Tommi with him, putting him in danger when they encounter a sinister motorcycle gang.

Every year, 17-year-old Wolfgang from Hesse spends his summer vacation with his grandfather in Fischerhude in Schleswig-Holstein. In the north, he always meets his childhood sweetheart Nanni, whom he wants to marry soon. But the two of them are not destined for happiness. The war throws a spanner in the works. Love must fail.

In 1923, Ludwig Bodmer, a young man returning from the war, works in the gravestone company of his comrade Georg Kroll during the period of inflation. Business is going well, but inflation robs them of their profits and people suffer under the circumstances of the time. The "lost generation" in particular, the survivors of the First World War, of which Ludwig is one, struggles to find a place in society.