Hendrik Massute

A woman and her daughter struggle to make their way through the aftermath of the Balkan war.

The ambitious scientist Franz Walter doesn't hesitate when he is promised a professorship at the university. He immediately accepts, pledges absolute loyalty to the system and agrees to work for the GDR's foreign intelligence service until he can take up his new position. Together with his colleague Dirk, he is sent on foreign assignments to West Germany. Franz soon has to use blackmail to get innocent people to talk. But his superiors go even further: GDR refugees and their relatives are targeted to be psychologically destroyed, forged letters, medical diagnoses, surveillance and wiretapping are on the agenda. However, this is more than Franz can bear: he feels powerless and increasingly isolates himself. When he then decides to steal secret documents for a later defection to the West, this results in an unfortunate chain reaction leading to his arrest and ultimately to his execution...

All of a sudden, 16-year-old Martha vanishes. Her father Lothar, who for years has had no contact with her or his ex-wife, sets off unwilling to find her. He soon realises other young people are also vanishing from the city inexplicably. Lothar follows their trail across the country. He meets the occasional young person but the trail goes cold. In the next city he encounters militia groups and a reinforced police presence. Children are forbidden to be on the streets unless accompanied by adults. The world has changed...

Young Roman and his mother Oksana leave Ukraine and go to Germany, where she works illegally while they both live with Gert, an old widower who tries to befriend Roman, who struggles for his mother's attention and sees Gert as a rival.

The five-year-old Flo cannot understand the condition that her father is in. Her mother explains: "He is with us but also far away at the same time". This description sparks the child's creativity, as she begins to imagine her father embarking on a journey far away, into the vastness of space.

The happy gay couple David and Khaled would love to marry publicly - if there weren't Khaled's homophobic father Faisal, David's pseudo orthodox Jewish acting mother Lea and a possible paternity and gallery insolvency.

August 1942: Amidst the unimaginable suffering inflicted during the blockade of Leningrad by the German Wehrmacht, an orchestra director was given an almost impossible task: to stage the premiere of Dimitri Shostakovitch's "Leningrad Symphony". The performance became a symbol of the brief triumph of culture over the barbarism of war.

In 1929, on the shores of Lake Constance, zeppelins are being built in the small town of Friedrichshafen. Fascinated by airships, Robert gets a job in the assembly shop thanks to Thea's brother Konrad, with whom he has fallen madly in love. The trio spent all their spare time together, frequently accompanied by Karl. In 1937, obsessed with zeppelins, Robert, now the father of a young Jakob, abandons his wife. One night, Konrad died under mysterious circumstances when he fell from a ready-to-launch Hindenburg. A few months later, Robert also died aboard an airship. In the 70s, Jakob, then his own son, Matthias, in 2005, will successively try to understand what happened...