After twelve years in the gulag, Karl returns to Vienna with his Russian wife and two daughters. People in post-war Austria don't want to know anything about what happened to him. The ‘Russians’ were met with suspicion at best. He therefore had to rise up the social ladder as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. Karl gets divorced, marries a young medical student, moves to Germany, makes dubious connections in Moscow - and separates his daughters. From then on, Lara and Luna grow up in different worlds: one in simple circumstances with her mother in Vienna, the other with her father and his new middle-class family in Munich.
