On the run from her criminal Italian husband, a young French woman meets a German lover in West Berlin who offers her shelter but who also gets entangled in her threatened life ever deeper.

Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.

The ageing actor Peter Poller, whose name still has traction, is engaged as a guest at a provincial theater. They are performing a play by Molière. Poller is an alcoholic and his physical collapse is only a matter of time. His colleagues are watching him: the fear that the performance could fail through his fault is coupled with envy of his star role, which he also plays in his private life. His old "friend" and rival, the actor Karl Tietz, lurks unsuspectingly for the opportunity to stand in for him. Only the young Dagmar Möller seems to trust her great colleague. She makes every effort to help Poller overcome his problem and mediate between him and Tietz. But the battle continues - one wants to destroy the other. In the end, it is Dagmar who is broken by this game of intrigue, which she does not want to play and which she is not up to. However, the two old ladies are back on stage together - in a role that, like so many others, will "irrevocably" be their "last"...

For some disabled children during the Nazi era, their fate becomes a "journey of no return": under the pretext of being transferred to other children's homes, they are in fact subjected to medical experiments and subsequently murdered. The film's plot also weaves in a love story, a kidnapping, and a deadly escape.

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.

After spending three years doing field installation work in West Africa, Fred returns home to his old neighbourhood, an industrial region on the outskirts of a major city. He is filled with confidence and optimism for a new start. He has brought home with him a pile of money that he made in Africa. But he never wrote to his wife Rita. He only wired her a money transfer every month. In the meantime, Rita has a new life that she now shares with a GI. Fred rents a room in the "Royal", a sleazy hotel. There, he meets Alma, who takes care of the rooms and the guests and who is being kept by her sugar daddy - the aging hotel director. A passionate encounter with his old girlfriend Vera, who had high hopes for the two of them at some earlier time, dissipates into a brief carnal episode

A strike for better wages puts machine fitter Dieter Wittowski in financial difficulties. This upsets his plans for the future and brings his wife a step closer to self-realization, as she now accepts a more responsible job against his will. There are also disagreements with his father, whose blacksmith business he describes as a supplier for mass sales.