Carsten Kaltner

ZERV" tells of the first years after the fall of the Wall, the breaks in life courses, of completely different biographies and of the successful coming together in the common fight against crime, which knows no East and West. ZERV stands for the Central Investigation Office for Government and Association Crime, founded in Berlin in 1991 by decision of the federal government.

Because photographer Harry Wegener loves animals and nature, he travels a lot and therefore has little time for his family. His wife Katharina has already filed for divorce, but has so far neglected to sign the papers, and he has also made a mess of things with his older daughter Julia. Only his sweetheart Fritzi still sticks by him. After suffering a heart attack, he is forced to return to Germany from Africa. He can't stay with Fritzi because her apartment is too small. So he has no choice but to turn up at his wife's...

At the beginning, everything looks like a normal job. But in the apartment of a cruelly murdered woman, Judith Kepler, a crime scene cleaner by trade, encounters her own past. The dead woman had done research and wanted to contact Judith. And she knew her closely guarded secret: Judith had been brought as a child under mysterious circumstances in a DDR children's home. Origin: unknown. Now, 25 years later, Judith has the evidence in her hands that she was swapped as a child. A stranger lived her life. Did this stranger also die of her - Judith's - death?