Plot: From July, 1913 to the outbreak of World War I, a series of incidents take place in a German village. A horse trips on a wire and throws the rider; a woman falls to her death through rotted planks; the local baron's son is hung upside down in a mill; parents slap and bully their children; a man is cruel to his long-suffering lover; another sexually abuses his daughter. People disappear. A callow teacher, who courts a nanny in the baron's household, narrates the story and tries to investigate the connections among these accidents and crimes. What is foreshadowed? Are the children holy innocents? God may be in His heaven, but all is not right with the world; the center cannot hold.
Alternative Plot: Using their social status and harsh punishments, a baron (Ulrich Tukur), a doctor (Rainer Bock) and a pastor (Burghart Klaussner) rule over a small German village. One day, the doctor falls off his horse after it trips over a wire strung between two trees. More pranks follow, seemingly without reason, all directed at the village's upper class and growing increasingly more brutal with time. There are no suspects, but a local schoolteacher (Christian Friedel) has his suspicions.
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