When world-famous conductor Eduard Sporck accepts the job to create an Israeli-Palestinian youth orchestra, he is quickly drawn into a tempest of sheer unsolvable problems.
The focus is on a family - or what one might think of it today: a wide variety of characters and interests collide when people grow together into a family, in a time when everyone just wants to become something, but nobody knows how to be someone anymore.
Two worlds collide when the thoroughbred Swabian Roland Reuter is transferred to Duisburg by his employer, the bakery Weckle. There he is supposed to bring the downsized company branch back into the black. For the solid employee an immense challenge - not least because his wife Sybille and pubescent daughter at home in the country has remained. Thus, Roland works hard from Monday to Friday to implement Swabian work ethic for his staff, who are endowed with typical Ruhr-pot-serenity.
This is a family story that covers thirty years in the life of the Freytag family (narrated by the grandson, Robert). When his grandfather returns from Russia in 1949, he becomes part of the German "economic miracle" by producing garden gnomes. Klaus, Robert's father, wants to become a writer. He marries Gisela who almost immediately gets pregnant with Robert - but the marriage doesn't work. Both parents abandon the child, and Robert goes on living with both pairs of grand parents. While his father belongs to the 1968 generation that rebels against their fathers he falls in love with the neighbor's's daughter Laura.
