copy paste animations? I have a plane where I would like to animate some events over time.
These events are always the same (e.g. an object appearing and disappearing), or showing a smoke animation on a location on the map for e.g. 5 seconds.

Now I can add e.g. a cube to the plane, create an animation from it at e.g. frame 10 and let it last for 60 frames. But is it possible to import/export the animation object(s) only so that I can kind of copy and paste them at different frames and locations on the map?
It sounds like you want the Dope Sheet view.  From there you can move/copy/paste key frames to different times.  It looks like this:



You might also want to look into Actions.
https://www.blender.org/manual/animation/actions.html