The love between Klaus and Uma, children of Slavic émigrés in Berlin, collides with the Twentieth Century and emerges defeated.
Crushed by a cumbersome past and the looming present, they cannot have a future together, but only two individual lives, separated by the Wall, erected in the middle of officially pacified Europe with no declared wars.
Their story will resume, with tragic implications, after reunification and the illusion of a world finally free of confrontation and violence.
The rush of events will overwhelm their generation and the next, particularly the lives of Franz and Olga, who are inextricably linked to a Destiny that has quietly worked in the shadows throughout the century, marking the events and decisions of grandparents, fathers, sons and grandchildren.