Eleven-year-old Jella lives with her mother in a rural idyll in which both feel at home and comfortable. Then, however, they move to the city where her father works. On parting, her friend Freitag presents Jella with a pair of pigeons. Although Jella is looking forward to life in the city, she is unable to accustom herself to her new surroundings. She is being picked on by the other children, and a neighbor′s son even releases her pigeons. They fly back to Freitag who returns them to Jella. When Jella visits the village one day, she is disappointed to learn that she has become a stranger there, as well.

August 1961. The former Foreign Legionnaire, King, has collected a gang of hooligans, with whom he creates mischief in the GDR. After some careless work on a construction site, an event during which two people lose their lives, they move to a campsite on the Baltic Sea. With sputtering mopeds, loud radios, and occasional outbursts, the gang makes the vacationers' lives living hell. Unfortunately for them, Lieutenant Czernik discovers the connection between them and the accident at the construction site. To stop them from fleeing to West Berlin, Lieutenant Czernik and the police need to arrest them, one at a time, with King as the last.

A Saturday evening dance in the village pub is interrupted when the barn of local farmer Paul Gäbler catches on fire. The farmer himself is soon found – hanged. Sawmill owner Züllich claims that Gäbler committed suicide because he was forced to join an agricultural production cooperative, but others are convinced Gäbler was murdered. Officers Schneider and Anders must navigate their way through a complex maze of personal and political motivations in order to reconstruct the crime.