A murder case is drawing more attention to the family history of historian Adelgunde. In cooperation with a young Russian girl, who knows surprisingly much about her father, Adelgunde finds out about strictly guarded family secrets.
When the ambitious Philip takes over the running of the family business from his father, he finds himself confronted by the mysterious reappearance of his dead ancestors. In the course of a long night, during which there is a murder, an illicit love affair and a game with false identities, Philip uncovers a closely guarded family secret.
The emotional death of an oversexed society. No one helps anybody else. But then, shortly before Basti attempts to commit suicide, before he jumps from Vienna's Reichsbrücke into the notoriously gluttonous Danube, something happens between the two young protagonists. Basti and Claudia meet on the bridge. Two bungee jumpers without a cord. They both recognize themselves in the other's life, between reform school and the family's butcher shop, between child abuse and games that involve getting tied up.
Vienna 1910. Hans Trautendorffer, an 35 year old journalist bets with his newpaper chief that he'll be able to work as a farm worker in the country for a whole year. But his dreams of a healthy, quiet country life don't come true- at least not the way he expected it.
After his father is murdered by the Nazis in 1938, a young Viennese Jew named Ferry Tobler flees to Prague, where he joins forces with another expatriate and a sympathetic Czech relief worker. Together with other Jewish refugees, the three make their way to Paris, and, after spending time in a French prison camp, eventually escape to Marseille, from where they hope to sail to a safe port
