In the fall of 1945, only a few months after WWII, 19-year-old German POW Mark Niebuhr arrives with other prisoners at a train station near Warsaw.

Havana in the 1950s: Larita loves Elvis Presley and Ernest Hemingway. But her rebellios friend Victor is more concerned with current Cuban politics than with her ideas and dreams.

Margit Fliesser is a mathematician in her mid-30s who works in a medium-sized company; she has two children and has been divorced twice. Her colleagues like her and respect her professional skills, but she is somewhat shy and inhibited.

In the little town of Herzsprung almost nothing has changed since German unification—except a rise in unemployment. Johanna, a young mother and widow, becomes one of the unemployed and lives on welfare.