Elke Steube is an 18-year-old schoolgirl, and on day she reveals to her parents that she has entered a marriage of concenience with a Kurdish Turk. The idea was to protect him from being deported, since his application for political assylum has been rejected by the authorities. Her middle-class, liberal parents are initially horrified by their daughters spontaneous act which they fear, may have consequences that cannot be foreseen, and fail to see that for Elke the marriage is purely a formality and a gesture of political solidarity. The following day, Harald, her father, meets his "son in-law" to try to persuade him that the marriage must be annulled as soon as possible. Mahmut proves to be a thoroughly nice and decent young man, well able to convince Harald that as a Kurd struggling for the rights of that minority in Turkey he would be hunted down and tortured; his very life would be in danger. His application for political assylum has been turned down because he could not furnish any absolute proof of this. Harald cannot believe that the German authorities would behave like this, and therefore this otherwise unpolitical teacher starts to take an interest in the case of Mahmut, the Kurd.