A homosexual, crazy guy tries to be “normal.” So he begins to search a girl. He first of all starts a membership in a sports club as a short distance runner. But his results are very poor. Suddenly he saw an other member of the Club, a girl, and starts a affair with her.
Anna is a Jewish girl in Germany. When the Nazis come to power in the 1930s, her family has to flee the country without being able to bring any of their belongings. Even young Anna's pink toy rabbit has been confiscated along with the family's other possessions. Initially the family lives in Switzerland, but even here they come to feel the antisemitism. And when money becomes scarce, and Anna's father can't find work as a journalist and Jew, they move on to France, where they are no long submitted to racial discrimination, but struggle financially. Eventually the entire family manages to go to England.
A copywriter gets famous with his first book. When asked to write a new novel about love for his publisher, he urgently needs tutoring since he doesn't know the first thing about it. His way through the beds leads him to the very young Orli. In her he discovers the true meaning of love, which makes him forget all the wrong paths of the past decades and feel young again.
Volker Schlöndorff transposes Bertolt Brecht’s late-expressionist work to latter-day 1969. Poet and anarchist Baal lives in an attic and reads his poems to cab drivers. At first feted and later rejected by bourgeois society, Baal roams through forests and along motorways, greedy for schnapps, cigarettes, women and men: ‘You have to let out the beast, let him out into the sunlight.’ After impregnating a young actress he soon comes to regard her as a millstone round his neck. He stabs a friend to death and dies alone. ‘You are useless, mangy and wild, you beast, you crawl through the lowest boughs of the tree.’
