The film is based on diaries and memoirs, on eyewitness accounts and police files, on newspaper clippings and transcripts of diplomats and artisans, dancers and journalists, proletarians, housewives, politicians and cocaine traders. Over thirty real people from the past, whose quotes are linked with archive material to portray a society in a state of tumult.
Four actors bring the quotes to life: Fritzi Haberlandt, Leonie Benesch, Peter Kurth and Anton von Lucke. With them, the film goes through the nightlife and everyday life between coal stove and gramophone; follows death into the shantytowns and life in the summer; bustles in backyards and plunges into the street fights of Bloody May as well as in the crash of the Black Friday. You can see a city that no longer exists and a country that knows nothing about its future.
There are 15 parties in the Reichstag, from the very left to the extreme right, every government is an impossible coalition. People from all over Europe are still coming to enjoy themselves in the city of sin, where the old rules are no longer valid, but new ones have not yet been found. They go to the bars and cabarets, they disappear in dark pubs where gangsters rule and sex is cheap. In the theater, the language of modernity is spoken, in the pictures the colors explode. But unemployment is high and the old forces want to return to power.