A young man seeks freedom and eventually gets conformed. To escape society, he wanders south. After some adventures he returns to his lover, where he expects a civil career.

In the late 1970s the German secret service fights against RAF terrorism and searches for constitutional enemies in the public service. Teacher Brasch implicates secret service agent Körner and the government in the suicide of a young teen. As a result Brasch and the exposed Körner are fired.

Berlinger is the sorty of two men who grow up together in pre-war Germany; when Roeder's parents die, Berlinger's father takes the orphanedboy under his care. As the two boys approach adulthood, their contraddictory temperaments lead them along different paths: the idealistic young Berlinger, a brilliant chemist, refuses to give his father's factoy over to the Nazi war effort, much to the dismay of his friend Roeder, who has been managing the plant for him and has joined the Nazi party. Depsite the pressure Roeder puts on Berlinger to accede, such as threatening the lives of Berlinger's wife and child, nothing can coerce the staunch individualist to douse his spirit, and he takes his only recourseby escaping to Latin America and leaving his wife and child behind. Thirty years later Berlinger returns, still the stubborn ninconformist, mad about fying and filled with dreams of building a fleet of zeppelins in the now ramshackle factory. Roeder too is unchanged with an austerity similar to the skyscraper offcie from which he manages his company. Once more the ambitions of the two men clash: Roeder depends on Berlinger to sell his land in order to successfully conclude his property development schemes.

Nine fictitious documentaries and films reflect the mood of late 1970s Germany, particularly the two-month period in 1977 when a businessman was kidnapped by the RAF (Red Army Faction). The kidnap had been made to orchestrate the release of the original leaders of the RAF, aka the Baader-Meinhof.