New times, new dangers. Vienna, 1927. Angry demonstrators set the Palace of Justice on fire, and the police shoot dozens of people. In this inferno, two ten-year-old boys come face to face: Viktor Obernosterer, the son of a worker, and Ernst Belohlavek, a child from a home. In the same year, Max, scion of the esteemed civil servant family Webern, is to be admitted to the prestigious Vienna Schottengymnasium. Meanwhile, in distant South Tyrol, his cousin Siegfried, son of the former imperial hunter Julius Holzer, attends a primary school where his mother tongue is forbidden. Four families whose fates are repeatedly intertwined. A new generation that must pay for the mistakes of their parents: their lives are inextricably linked to the fate of Austria, which is increasingly spiraling into a cycle of hate and violence and is inexorably heading towards a bloody civil war.