A family's decline coincides with Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s and serves as an allegory for German society as a whole.

The Essenbeck family runs the German steel industry and the nervous patriarch attempts to appease the Nazis by appointing a successor sympathetic to their cause. But his choice sets off a round of in-fighting as his children battle for control of the company.

His young grandson eventually takes charge, but his drug addiction wreaks havoc on his family when he brutally rapes his mother and turns her into an addict.

By the end of the film, the Nazis, including the party members in the family, are on the verge of taking over Europe.