The story of a murder in the Black Forest in 1943. Anna, a Polish maid working as a domestic servant, is found dead in a pond one day. She was expecting a child by the farmer Rungerbühler, who murdered her for fear of the "racial disgrace" being discovered. Although the police commissioner soon sees through the circumstances, he has no interest in uncovering the case for his own selfish reasons. Rot, a basket weaver who secretly loved Anna, reacts to her death with a physical breakdown of a profane nature: intestinal obstruction. The character of Joachim Rot and his strange fate are based on a real person.
Nathaniel Box, a self-styled prophet, along with his daughter Barbara and her fiancé Curtis, holds a night time press conference in an underground car park, devoutly believing that "a new Messiah for a New Age" will appear there before dawn - and their wait does not go unrewarded.
25 years ago a mother and father went missing and were presumed murdered on Wolfe Island and their bodies never found, and now a tabloid journalist and a woman who may have a connection to the Island are out to find out Whodunit?
Georgia Benfield, at her wit's end, loses control and begins physically abusing her elderly mother, just as Georgia had been abused herself as a child.
This film deals with the contrasts of the Wilhelminian era in Berlin: the splendor of the monarchy, the economic and intellectual vitality of the up-and-coming imperial capital on the one hand, and the misery of the proletarians in the tenements on the other.
What are Ilona Herfurt and her boyfriend Dietmar Freistrath doing in the old mine? Where does the money come from that her son Jimmy finds under the newspaper? Where have the unique and intricately carved works of art, often passed down for generations, disappeared to from the village in the Ore Mountains? What do the carver Gerlach and his foster daughter llona have to do with it? Questions upon questions that are burning under the detective's nails.
