The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.

The architect Stefan Hellwig is to plan the construction of a housing estate for a hard stone factory in Tyrol. As his landlord Meier from Dortmund is on his way to Africa with his family, he gets a cheap ride to Tyrol. There, the Meiers are initially forced to make a stopover because their daughter Babsi is weak. While they finally abandon their plans for Africa to spend their vacation in Tyrol, the budding romance between Stefan and the local vet Karin seems to come to an abrupt end when she finds out why he is in Tyrol.

Life on the border to the GDR is as dreary as the "Werra-Post". To increase circulation, Willi Busch, reporter and heir to the local paper, takes action: sometimes he demolishes telephone boxes, sometimes he fantasizes a child into a prophetess who talks to sheep. Only when he fakes a dead man's past as an informer does Willi's paper corpses suddenly become real...