When the hard-working bread-winner Katja and Hendrik the intellectual meet Saida, an illegal immigrant from Algeria, and accept to organize a "passport marriage" between her and Hendrik, they are caught up in a chain of events and feelings over which they have no control.

A young couple argue through their own wedding party.

Shot with striking immediacy by a subjective camera, “Angst isst Seele auf” assumes the point of view of a black actor in Germany dealing with racist abuse as he prepares to appear in a play based on Fassbinder’s film, about the taboo relationship between an older German woman and an Arab man. Sharing the same lead actress (Brigitte Mira), cinematographer (Jürgen Jürges), and editor (Thea Eymèsz) as in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 Film “Angst essen Seele auf”, these twin works offer a searing indictment of prejudice within German society.

In 1938 Hans Zeisig, an apolitical comedian, impersonator and cabaret actor, flees with a Russian passport (instead of American, which he would have preferred) from Nazi-Berlin, and finds himself in the legendary Hotel Lux, the 'lost paradise' of the Comintern, in Moscow. Everyone believes that Zeisig is a man named Hansen, Hitler's personal astrologer. But Zeisig quickly realizes that he's gone from the frying pan into the fire. In the Hotel Lux he meets his friends Frida and later Meyer again, still passionate communists. For the three idealists an adventure between love and death begins to run his course.

A former gymnast has stolen a computer chip from the vault of the Berlin customs office, which the Mafia is also interested in.

Little Berthold Wettelsteck is an avid comic book reader and is particularly fond of the comic book hero Nick Knatterton's stories. Until the story suddenly becomes reality and he suddenly finds himself in it.