Architect Alexander Beck has just won an architecture prize. He wants to modernize GDR building blocks in Thuringia. Alex travels to the heart of rural Eastern Germany where he grew up and where people remember him as Alex from the Free German Youth, a pro-GDR youth organization.

Two old pals lose their work as boatmen on the Elbe river. While down-to-earth Gero tries to get back on his feet, reckless Kowsky keeps gambling with friendship and life time and time again. For all that, they set out together from Dresden for Hamburg, hoping to find new work, a new love, a new life.

The thirty year old bee is a daredevil, everything seems to work for him. But suddenly a tragic event tears him out of his carelessness. In the explosion of a carbide furnace in operation, a colleague is killed.

Detectives Karl Jäger and Lola Kraft are investigating again. An inconspicuous family man saves a young woman from being raped and uses unexpected skills that not only attract the attention of himself, but also of the police. But it is not just his mysterious past that troubles the amnesiac victim, but also a killer squad. Who is after him? And what is the mystery of his past?