A woman, free from obligations, husband, and children for a few days, travels from The Hague to Frankfurt via Amsterdam in January 1969. Three love stories from times of war and defeat occupy her mind: her own, that of her parents, and that of an ancestor during the Napoleonic Wars. She wants to tell these stories, but they and the lives become increasingly intertwined: a king who builds modern Netherlands; his illegitimate daughter, who is forced into a Mecklenburg noble family; her great-grandson, who, as an imperial submarine captain, outsmarts the red sailors of Kiel, seeks to escape his dark soul, and becomes a popular preacher; his daughter - the traveling storyteller herself - who wanted to be a good German girl yet oppose the Nazis, now seeks liberation in writing alongside a man, the smiling son of a landowner and a latecomer.