1974, the year of the oil crisis and car-free day. Things are going haywire for the Redlich and Berkovitz families. Elfi Redlich finds her supposed great love in Ireland. Daughter Moni invests her 15,000 Schilling marriage premium in her first apartment. Son Charlie's success as a rock musician is overshadowed by drug problems. Rafi Berkowitz falls in love with the granddaughter of the old Nazi Ulmendorff, of all people, and the bad-hearted Hasak causes the next catastrophe.

October 1960. Nineteen-year-old Charlie tries his luck as a rock 'n' roll musician on the Reeperbahn. His mother Elfi has her hands full with her sick mother, her unstable husband Viktor, daughter Moni, who finally wants to stand on her own two feet, and her job as a tailor. The Berkowitz family factory is thriving, and even the Ulmendorff sawmill in Salzburg has something to say about the emerging economic miracle. Ferencz dies in a car accident. His wife Valerie is pregnant by her lover, the painter Ramsacher. And the cunning Hasak continues to devise intrigues for his own benefit, which even in the 1960s does not seem to be the case.

Austria in the mid-1950s. Seamstress Elfi Redlich and her two children are about to emigrate to America with occupation officer Hal when her husband, missing for eleven years, returns home from Siberia. Factory owner Ulmendorff is deported to Russia on his way to his niece Valerie's wedding as a result of an intrigue by his employee Hasak. Hasak's joy is short-lived, as the Jewish owner of the factory asserts his ownership.