In London at the turn of the century, underworld kingpin Mack the Knife marries Polly Peachum without the knowledge of her father, the equally enterprising 'king of the beggars'.

For Balduin, going out to beer parties with his fellow students and fighting out disputes at the tip of the sword have lost their charms. He wants to find love; but how would he, a penniless student, ever dare looking up to any woman worth of loving? Absorbed in his dreary thoughts and indifferent to the advances of Lyduschka, Balduin is unexpectedly offered a fortune by the mysterious money-lender Scapinelli - but on a strange condition...

It was not just the children who were treated badly by the wealthy Weimar republic. Robert Kramer is released from prison but struggles to adjust to civilian life. His father disowns him, his wife has left him for another man. There is no work. He eventually arrives in a shelter for the homeless, and seeks salvation through Emma, a prostitute.

In 1921, we follow two women - Marie and Grete - from the same poor Viennese neighborhood, as they try to better the lives of themselves and their families during the period of Austrian postwar hyperinflation.

Based on the novel 'Elsker hverandre' by Aage Madelung, the film follows various lives, one of which is Jewish girl Hanne-Liebe, as she grows up, and experiences the pains of living as a Jew in Russia, leading to a revolution.