20 volunteers agree to take part in a seemingly well-paid experiment advertised by the university. It is supposed to be about aggressive behavior in an artificial prison situation. A journalist senses a story behind the ad and smuggles himself in among the test subjects. They are randomly divided into prisoners and guards. What seems like a game at the beginning soon turns into bloody seriousness.
Udo is invisible - no one ever seems to notice him. He makes the most of it, working as a department store detective and living off other people's lives as they never notice him tagging along. Until he meets the one woman who sees him.
Hotte is a petty criminal on probation. He has two teenage children, but he doesn't want to know anything about them. When their grandmother dies, he is given custody of them, which he is not particularly happy about - but he could do with the child benefit. And gradually he starts to like life as a middle-class family man - but probation officer Benno is convinced that Hotte doesn't have what it takes to be a responsible father and does everything he can to sabotage his new start. But Hotte takes care of that himself by getting involved in a crooked deal with his Albanian buddy Ivic. Benno is also plagued by private worries: he can't father any children, but his girlfriend Tanja is desperate to have offspring...
As a 15-year-old, Marcus survived several concentration camps, changed his name after liberation, and settled in Germany. From then on, he suppressed his past until it caught up with him again, now over 80 years old. Since he wants to be buried according to Jewish tradition, he needs proof of his identity—the tattooed prisoner number is not enough for the bureaucratic rabbis. So the young German-Turkish woman Gül drives him to his Hungarian village of birth, where no one knows him anymore. Only a blind woman seems to have been expecting him.
Berlin, 1934. Many men are forced to live their hidden homosexuality. Erich, a photographer, has an appointment in his photo studio with Wolfgang, a Nazi soldier, with whom he shares a loving, tumultuous, and passionate relationship. For both of them, this should not be a problem, but appearances deceive.