The film describes the activity of an ABV of the People's Police in its section in East Berlin. A mixture of “positive” characters from the beginning, the extensively staged “owl”, who is introduced as a criminal and over the course of time, especially due to the influence of the ABV, develops into a good citizen, and incorrigible characters, with whom the ABV fails with its extensive attempts at rehabilitation and who are arrested after having committed again offenses.

They are just 17 years old when Gaby and Eva receive the offer to play in a feature film that ambitious Hamburg filmmakers want to make. Despite their youth, the girls are suspicious because they have already experienced a lot. On the other hand, that would be the opportunity to escape the difficulties they have been in for a long time. The filmmakers persuade them to cross the border illegally. The girls do not suspect that they should be used by the Springer company to provoke a scandal. But the Ministry of State Security has the action already in sight.

The school authorities want to read success stories in director Joachim Faber's reports. But they cannot simply be produced on an assembly line. Pupils, for example, use the wrong tone. The matter draws circles until the superiors finally talk about refusal to work. Director Faber is caught between the efforts to resolve the conflict with pedagogical means and the pressure from above.

The "Concordia" trading company in Würzburg is a secret headquarters of the MID, a secret service agency of the US Army. For years, espionage, sabotage, and diversion operations originated from here in order to undermine the Socialist Republic of Germany. A favorable moment for a military attack approaches and plans are developed. These plans are placed in the hands of Major Collins, who keeps them in a safe. Hansen has worked for him for many years, but also for the Stasi as a double agent. Security Chief Colonel Rock knows there is a leak, but Hansen has passed every test thrown at him. He is trying to deal with his current assignment: acquiring the plans so they can be made public. His mission is to get them out of the safe and into the GDR without getting caught.

This elaborate two-part television film features a section from the life of communist worker leader Ernst Thälmann. It begins with the bloody riots on May 1, 1929 in Berlin, in which police officers shot at demonstrating workers, and ends with February 7, 1933, when Thälmann appeared as a speaker at the illegal meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany in goat neck. This period was marked by the struggle of the Communists against the ever stronger National Socialists and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Paul Schulte takes a spa stay on the Baltic Sea to have his heart condition treated. His wife Barbara accompanies him and finds interest in the valuable art objects in a nearby church. Together with her accomplice and lover Klaus Grunow, she plans to break into the church. But Paul Schulte sees through his wife's plans and tries to dissuade her. One morning, Paul Schulte is found dead.

Ruth is an attractive, independent woman in her early 50s who has always lived for her daughter. But Lea, now in her mid-20s, is starting to break away from her dominant mother. In this difficult and conflicting time between mother and daughter, Lea suddenly falls ill with multiple sclerosis. In Ruth, a terrible suspicion begins to germinate: Lea may have been poisoned by intensive contact with solvents in the printing house where she has a student job. When Ruth voices her fear, the company turns on the works attorney Robert. He turns out to be Ruth's old childhood sweetheart.

A right-wing radical, who is not quite aware that he is one, goes around with his buddies beating people up and taking part in scene events. Things look bad at home. His mother is in the hospital because her husband beat her up. The drunken father has long since brought in a replacement, a homeless woman. The teenager lives in eternal stress with the alcoholic, but gains respect from his father through his right-wing radical friends. From now on, his home becomes the main meeting place of the clique. When one of the antisocial outings of the clique ends fatally for one of the victims, the father offers his son and his friends first an alibi, later a hiding place..

In 1989, teacher Wendler and his wife leave the GDR to join his Bavarian uncle. In the West, the line-loyal educator with a whitewashed CV is immediately accepted back into the teaching profession. He advances to become a model Bavarian. Until one day a pupil from bygone GDR days turns up...