Three friends

Robby, Otto and Gottfried became friends for life during the First World War. As demobilised soldiers, life in post-war Germany, which was torn apart and starving, was not much easier. However, their comradeship helps them survive in the fight for a bare existence, and they manage to take care of one of their girlfriends when she loses her job and falls seriously ill. Comradeship is the only good thing that the war and the hopelessness of returning from it taught them, and it is precisely this comradeship and the love of a man for a woman—a true love without clichés and pathos, ordinary, strong, threatened by the adversity of fate—that makes life worth living.