Albert Heins

A West Berlin couple hopes to solve their marital problems while on vacation in Spain. Instead, the tensions between the neglected and misunderstood woman and her annoyed and otherwise unsatisfied husband escalate soon afterwards. She starts an affair with her Persian masseur, he falls in love with a mute toilet attendant, whom he brings back to Berlin and takes in with himself and his two pubescent children, while the woman moves in with her masseur. But even the new constellations quickly get into crisis.

Five more-or-less distinct sections, all featuring "Freak" Orlando, a woman played by the late Magdalena Montezuma, who appears in various guises and deformities throughout.

A decadent Cabaret in Hamburg is near closing down. The owner decides to make a last effort to save the place: produce a male striptease show. Many candidates answer to his newspaper ad. No matter how weird were the rehearsals, the owner would have no regrets.

A treatise on love and desire tainted by harsh reality of capitalism, in which submission to the laws of lust-as-commerce is played out by five prostitutes and their pimp, who pits them against one another so that they are incapable of standing up to him collectively.

Prussia is on the brink of national bankruptcy. King Frederick William III unexpectedly appoints the tax official Christian Rother as President of the Royal Prussian Maritime Trade.