AllMovie

A gay couple living in Berlin has a fairly bourgeois lifestyle: one is a high school teacher who defends the "squatters" in districts like Chamissoplatz, the other is a bookseller who admires Klaus Mann's novel Mephisto, a story about an actor who sold his soul to the Nazis and suffered the consequences. Through all their conversations; the death of the bookseller's father and subsequent inheritance (used to buy a better apartment rather than his own bookstore); and through the emotional upheavals of neighbors such as Christa, who cannot seem to find the right relationship; life seems to veer between the comic and the tragic -- without much forewarning.