Siegfried Voß

1934, Germany. Jan is a 13 year old boy, who is raised without a mother. His father, a communist, is accused of a political murder, and predicted to be shot by the police when he was on the run. Jan lives with his aunt and finds a friend, Max, who wants to help him to find out what really with his father happened. During a conspirative gathering Max is shot by SA (Nazi paramilitary) and Jan succeed to escape in a barge. Erika, the daughter of the captain of the barge, and a boatman hide him. They try to help Jan to escape from police and find his father, who really survived.

Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the paths of three people on the run cross by chance in the small Baltic Sea port of Rerig: Gregor, a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD); Judith, a Jewish woman; and a pastor who wants to save an Ernst Barlach sculpture classified as degenerate art. All those involved share a common fate and the dream of a fisherman's boy from Zanzibar, which is less a real goal than a utopia of a better future. Adaptation of Alfred Andersch's novel.

Against the historical background of the occupation of Paris by the German Wehrmacht, the story of a German émigré child who finds shelter with a French working-class family is told.