Goalkeeper Josef Bloch is sent off after committing a foul during an away game. This causes him to lose his bearings, and he wanders aimlessly through the city streets and spends the night with the box-office attendant of a movie theatre.

A man sentenced to death escapes from a military prison and finds shelter with a resistance group that is set to liberate the country. The repressive enemy never sleeps. The escaping condemned man is also no longer the old warrior he once was: he is broken - wonders whether the resistance can put him back together.

Lawyer Maria Rohn takes on the case of Martin Siebeck. The truck driver allegedly ran over a man on the highway. Siebeck denies the crime and states that two people threw the victim in front of his truck at full speed. The more Maria Rohn looks into the case, the more she notices inconsistencies. Her husband Günther is also behaving more and more strangely. It seems that he was also involved in the accident...

Karl Bockerer is a Viennese original. He survives the ‘great times’ – to his own dismay his birthday is on the same day as the one of the “Führer” – by pretending to be more stupid than he really is, and uncovers, over and over again, the hypocrisy and the uptightness of the epic nonsense in his milieu by means of real and phony naivety. Where Schweijk made a mockery of the ruling system by being a presumptive follower, the Viennese butcher strives against the tide. And he is not alone, has family and friends. His personal braveness protects him neither from the rebellion in his own house, nor from the horrors of total war…