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.

Devi, in her mid-thirties, is in the midst of a life crisis. She walks dogs in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg district and has neither a husband nor a child nor a successful career to show for herself. She is also searching for her great childhood sweetheart, Jonny Miller, with whom she lived in a shared apartment, but all she knows is that he lives in New York. Her search proves fruitless. Devi decides to leave everything behind, sublet her "apartment with stove heating," and go straight to New York to look for Jonny Miller. But everything turns out differently...