1897 - 1907: Ludwig Grandauer is a policeman in a village somewhere between Munich and Bad Tölz. A murder occurs after his wedding party, of all things. Suspicion falls on a peddler, Grandauer finds the real culprit years later.

May 1909: Karl Grandauer's bicycle is stolen. Afraid of his father's punishment, Karl keeps quiet about the theft. But the butcher Willy has a plan to raise the necessary capital for a new bike: Nude photos of a girl from the neighborhood.

The Grandauer family is worried about the health of mother Agnes. While their daughter Luise takes over the housework for her mother, Ludwig Grandauer has to visit the family of a murder suspect.

1914: The Munich police department moves into the long-awaited new building in the Löwengrube, while at home Luise Grandauer falls in love with Karl's friend Biwi. Now, of all times, the First World War breaks out.

December 1918: Germany has lost the First World War, food is running short, and the Spanish flu keeps killing large numbers of people. When Karl Grandauer comes back to Munich, he finds his family's old apartment inhabited by strangers

October 1920: A dead woman is found at the side of a small road, with a sign labelling her a traitor to her fatherland. During investigation, Karl Grandauer comes across Traudl Soleder again

1923: Karl Grandauer and Traudl Soleder want to get married. But inflation makes the wedding dress and the suit for the groom very expensive. Then childhood friend Willy offers his help.

November 9, 1923: The Soleders are moving out of their expensive apartment into police seargent Karl Grandauer's new official residence, but streets are blocked due to the ongoing Beer Hall Putsch, that started the night before, and Karl is prevented from leaving the police headquarters for some time.

October 22, 1929: Kurt Soleder is working as a presenter at the Munich radio station, when one of his musicians is coming in late due to some sudden sickness; minutes later the man is dead. Police finds out that he died from cyanide poisoning after eating some of the marzipan potatoes he got from the girl with whom he had spent the night.

Autumn 1931: A young man distributing the communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne is beaten up and deadly injured by two vigilantes, who claim that they caught him while breaking a shop-window to steal a radio, and that they only used violence when the alleged burglar put up a fight while being arrested.

January 30, 1933: Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. Chief inspector Grüner is leaving to spend a few weeks in a health resort, and replaced for the time by inspector Walter Deinlein, who fears to have irritated district attorney Adolf Grandauer by uttering a condescending comment about the new cabinet. Kurt and Sara Soleder come to visit Adelgunde on her name day, while Sara is heavily pregnant. Adolf Grandauer offers his sister Luise to convey substantial orders for the Nazi party to her husband's bakery, but advises them to get rid of their journeyman Toni, a leftist who has been caught up in street fights with the SA.

March 1933: Two policemen come to the Kreitmeiers’ bakery with a search warrant for the room of their journeyman, confiscating brass knuckles and some communist propaganda posters. Inspector Karl Grandauer is called to a gravel pit, where a dead boy with a bullet in his head has been found. Later, a mute swill dealer is arrested while carrying the gun the deadly shot was fired from. Mr. Hampel, Grandauer's former subordinate, who has just been transferred to the political police, gets a written confession out of the man, who previously claimed to have found the weapon on the ground. Eventually, one of the deceased boy's comrades from the Hitler Youth comes forward, admitting that he had taken his father's old army pistol to practice shooting in the gravel pit, where he accidentally killed his friend, leaving the gun behind.

March 21, 1933: An elderly Jewish man has killed himself by opening the gas-tap in his apartment, apparently in despair of the rampant antisemitic agitation in Germany; the Grandauers take care of his surviving dog. While many people are listening to President Hindenburg's and Chancellor Hitler’s speeches broadcast from the Day of Potsdam, Sara Soleder gives birth to a daughter. Baker Max Kreithmeier’s journeyman Toni, a staunch leftist, is imprisoned in the new established Dachau concentration camp.