A lakeside inn in Bavaria, bizarre guests, and a family entangled in an unwanted legacy over three generations. Josef Bierbichler, the great actor of German theater and film, narrates a hundred years of Germany. An epic about war and destruction, old power and new prosperity, about the supposedly fat years. In World War I, an enemy bullet first shatters the steel helmet and then the skull of the innkeeper's eldest son. Thus, his younger brother Pankraz must take on the paternal inheritance. Although he survives the second great war, he would still prefer to be an artist rather than a farmer and innkeeper. It takes a century storm threatening to blow the house and farm into the lake for Pankraz to finally become a capable entrepreneur and family man.