At dawn, the paramedics carry the body of a young woman from a villa in the Grunewald forest. Her name is Daisy, she was a successful medical student in her eighth semester. The plot jumps back a few days: Daisy has passed her pathology exam with distinction. Daisy's roommate Marie is celebrating the completion of her medical studies in the villa. A scandal breaks out during the party. Marie's boyfriend of many years, Bubi, flees from a petty bourgeois future at the side of the newly qualified assistant doctor. He leaves the party with a younger student. Despite her outward successes, she seems deeply dissatisfied, alternating between stimulants and tranquilizers and changing her sex partners more and more frequently. She now gets a particular kick out of making the abandoned Marie her lesbian lover.

Hamburg, mid 80s, Alex is a cabby. The sound is hard, pubs are dark and loud, people constantly argue about anything and everything, people smoke all the time, and not just cigarettes. Alex wants love and freedom and sleeps with Dietrich. It's far from being love, but the sex is okay. With Marc, a little person full of dignity, she finds more than that. The rest is struggles with her passengers, the indifferent and the doomed, brutes as other nuisances. This sort of life could go on and on, Alex could drive away from her own life and in doing so lose Marc and not getting rid of Dietrich. Wouldn't there be a small monkey with the same invincible desire for freedom as hers.

Germany in the early 19th century. "Die Vermessung der Welt" follows the two brilliant and eccentric scientists Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Friedrich Gauss on their life paths.