When Martin, a former GDR citizen, is released from jail, he lately becomes confronted with the consequences of the German re-unification.

Juliane Kostner is an attractive woman in her prime: charming, fashion-conscious, worldly. It's no coincidence that she has been head buyer at a luxury department store in Berlin for 30 years. Juliane's private life, on the other hand, is not quite so rosy. Single Juliane doesn't have a particularly trusting relationship with her grown-up daughter Henrike, for example. But when Henrike, who is heavily pregnant, has to go into hospital after a fainting spell, her husband, the busy pilot Martin, has no choice but to ask Juliane for a favor: She is to look after their two grandchildren for the duration of Henrike's stay in hospital.

A successful stockbroker gets in trouble and has to escape from Hamburg in Germany to Vänersborg in Sweden with his two children.

13-year-old Pauline, called Pik, has lived with her grandmother Wischonka since her mother died. Pik has never met her father. Her grandmother runs a boarding kennel that is on the verge of insolvency because many customers have handed in their animals at the wrong address. Pik wants to help her grandmother and tries to raise money at Cologne airport by performing a song. But she is taken away by the airport police. Although she manages to escape from the police at first, she accidentally observes how the corrupt policeman Kowatsch and a customs officer take away seized drugs. Kowatsch realizes that he has been observed, but is unable to catch Pik.