While his mother is in rehab and his father is on a 'business trip' with his assistant, 14-year-old outsider Maik is spending the summer holidays bored and alone at his parents' villa, when rebellious teenager Tschick appears. Tschick, a Russian immigrant and an outcast, steals a car and decides to set off on a journey away from Berlin with Maik tagging along for the ride. So begins a wild adventure where the two experience the trip of a lifetime and share a summer that they will never forget.

In 1938 Hans Zeisig, an apolitical comedian, impersonator and cabaret actor, flees with a Russian passport (instead of American, which he would have preferred) from Nazi-Berlin, and finds himself in the legendary Hotel Lux, the 'lost paradise' of the Comintern, in Moscow. Everyone believes that Zeisig is a man named Hansen, Hitler's personal astrologer. But Zeisig quickly realizes that he's gone from the frying pan into the fire. In the Hotel Lux he meets his friends Frida and later Meyer again, still passionate communists. For the three idealists an adventure between love and death begins to run his course.