Stephan Waldhoff, a journalist from Hamburg who is well-known for his committed reporting on social issues, finds himself in a professional crisis: the newspaper he works for decides it will not after all print his series about people who have suffered social decline. The general public simply isn’t very interested in these issues today. In his personal life, too, Waldhoff finds himself at a turning point: the friends he has known for years have begun to irritate him, and his girlfriend Martha wants them to move into a pleasant suburb and finally settle down to a comfortable, bourgeois life. In this sense the death of Kalle, the last person he interviewed for his feature on social outcasts, merely triggers Waldhoff’s startling resolution: he will walk from Hamburg to Munich on foot, without any money, accompanied only by a dog called Feldmann who he finds in an animal shelter. Waldhoff grits his teeth and sets off; perhaps this way he will develop a more genuine understanding for the subjects of his reports, those people who are not settled and live on the margins of society - and maybe he will also get to know himself better.