The tumultuous story of a family from East Germany that spans from the years of their exile in the 1940s to the period of the Fall of the Wall in 1989 and the more modern era. At the center are three generations: the grandparents, unrepentant communists, return to the German Democratic Republic from their exile in Mexico to contribute to the reconstruction of the new state. Their son, who emigrated to Moscow at a young age and was displaced to a forced labor camp in Siberia, also returns with his Russian wife to a petit-bourgeois society that he believes can change.

However, the grandson feels increasingly suffocated in the homeland chosen by his grandparents and parents – and then, on the day of his grandfather's ninetieth birthday, he decides to leave for the West. The glow of political utopia seems to fade from generation to generation… on the days when the light was dwindling.