The British parliament has decided to get rid of the royal family. All of them have to leave the county and so they move to Germany, where they want to live by their distant relatives, the Bettenberg family. But these are not amused about their snobbish visitors, which all want to reside in their little house without doing any work to earn their living.
Heinrich Lohse, a strict and highly efficient purchasing manager at a company bulk-orders 40 tons of mustard and enough typewriting paper for 40 years just to get discount. Heinrich's boss decides it’s time for him to retire early. Heinrich suddenly finds himself with nothing to do—except micromanage his household, much to the dismay of his wife Renate and their son Dieter
Willi Kritz earns his living as a night watchman and corpse washer at the East German Pathological Institute at the Berlin Clinic. In the process, he found another source of income: he steals pathological exhibits and smuggles them to West Berlin disguised as a Berlin bear. His customer is Frundsberg, and the delivery always takes place in his Yankee sleigh.
Based on the best-selling novel by Nobel-laureate Heinrich Böll, this drama is a passionate indictment of Catholicism. Hans Schnier (Helmut Griem) has earned his living as a clown, though he is in fact a very covert sort of social critic. After enduring a difficult childhood in Bonn during the Second World War, including his mother's fanatic Nazism, he is appalled to discover many of the people he knows and loves swept deeply into involvement in the Catholic Church.
A married couple of artists move to a utopian town known for its absolute freedom, but behind the surface perversion and violence are spreading.