Ben is in his early 20s and lives with Karl, his overweight, unemployed father in a prefabricated housing estate in Halle. Ben’s dream is to travel the world one day and write about it. But he still works as a distributor of brochures and writes only secretly fictitious travel reports on self-made postcards. His buddy Ingo (Max Riemelt) gives him a foothold in life and the vague hope that his father could soon find a new job that would make him human again and make him independent of his son. Ben’s dazzling dream of a better future, however, is thwarted by Charlemagne’s refusal. Increasingly the family is plagued by financial difficulties. In his attempts to raise more money, Ben gets into criminal circles. Only Ingo is stopping him from doing worse. But when Ben falls in love with Jana (Marie Rönnebeck), who comes from a better family, he becomes all the more painfully aware of his own desolate situation. He realizes that he must finally act.