Florian the miller gives all of his money to the war against Napoleon.

In the summer of 1945, Dresden factory workers send their colleague Kalle (Erwin Geschonneck) hundreds of miles north to pick up supplies. His attempts to travel through the Soviet occupation zone become a hilarious odyssey full of high jinks and misadventures.

Wolfgang Schmidt is a loquacious young man who works for the state-run advertising agency. When the main office head, Huster, reassigns Schmidt to the central administration, Schmidt tries to make clear that he doesn’t want the job and things turn precarious.

The scene is East Germany in 1977, during the infamous Red Army Faction kidnapping of industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer in West Germany. A couple of East German teens are caught with contraband photos of West German Baader-Meinhof terrorists.