"As long as I can remember, I've believed I was a divine being, or at the very least a special favourite of the gods. It was a long time before I realized that outside our four walls there were other people, who all held they had a right to exist and were oblivious to my divinity."
Growing up in the most modern city in the world, under the influence of a father who traces their family history back to Lohengrin and an uncle who deems his silicon penis a visible manifestation of the wonders of modern science, Hagen Seelhorst sees only one way of leading a meaningful life: he must become a hero and a saint.
The discrepancy between the young man's ambitious visions and the squalid nature of actual reality take on positively tragicomic dimensions. Proteus was the God of transformation, and Seelhorst proves himself to be a true acolyte of this god in his positively protean pilgrimage through the madness of post-war Germany.
The youth and spiritual journey of a man with aspirations of being a hero and a saint in the Germany of the second half of the twentieth century.
Michael Kleeberg, grew up in Böblingen and Hamburg. He lived in Rome and Amsterdam, and, from 1986 to 1994 was co-owner of an advertising agency in Paris. Today, he lives in Berlin, writing and translating from French and English.
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