Things could truly be better for regionally successful entrepreneur Manfred Brenner in the mid-1980s. For Brenner, however, there is no reason to worry, because he is firmly counting on a breakthrough with his newly founded company FlowTex. With innovative horizontal drilling systems, he wants to revolutionize underground pipeline construction. But at first the big success remains elusive.
He finally succeeds by relying on drilling systems and orders that don't even exist, piling up loan upon loan and leasing contract upon leasing contract. He uses charm and persuasion, and for a long time no one notices that Brenner is building a fraudulent consortium of companies with just a few helpers and a lot of falsified documents.
In Matringen, a small Swabian village, everybody knows Uwe, an outsider and notorious barfly. When Uwe witnesses the murder of the local beauty queen Susi Berger, nobody really takes him seriously. Left alone with his suspicion, Uwe starts investigating on his own. Step by step he starts to uncover the dark truths underneath the small-town idyll.
Follows the lives of different couples in dealing with their love lives in various loosely interrelated tales all set during a frantic few days before Christmas in Frankfurt, Germany.
The happening of a ceremonial robing of the youngest daughter as a novice in a Swabian convent screws up the values of a modern family. As if life wasn't complicated enough anyway. And how are you supposed to be happy without new clothes?
Green meadows, blue sky in Swabia: Actually, the world of the two villages Oberrieslingen and Unterrieslingen should be in perfect order. But she is not. Why? Because the two hostile villages have had to share a church and a cemetery since the Middle Ages, which has caused squabbles and squalor to this day.
