Klaus is tall enough to make cramped rooms feel smaller, and seems only dimly aware of the space he takes. Wavy blond hair lies in loose, slightly greasy bends, and his grey eyes hold a steady, measuring look. His face is clean-shaven and composed, with the faintly weathered texture of someone who has spent long hours outdoors. He moves carefully, placing each boot as if testing a forest floor for hidden traps. The unexpected detail: he keeps a little paper packet of flower seeds in his mechanic's jacket and scatters them beside roadside ditches.

Methodical and composed in the workshop, where he can make damaged things function again; courteous in company, where he uses good manners to keep people at a distance. In the woods he becomes patient, attentive, and cruelly curious. He can show real tenderness toward small living things, such as roadside flowers, while showing little mercy to a person he has decided to hunt.

Klaus remembers the forest first as a workplace. His first job was logging, and he learned to judge a tree by the sound it made under the axe and the way the wind moved through its crown. He wanted more than a dangerous wage and a life measured in felled timber, so he took whatever work offered a new road: hauling, repair work, military service, and eventually the trade of a mechanic. He served through both world wars and was attached to a werewolf brigade, where the wolfskin became both an instrument of war and a bargain he has never properly explained. Long ago, alone in the Bavarian woods, he asked something there to change him. It gave him a wolf's hide. He does not discuss what the thing was or what it took in return. A formative night came during the first war, when he used the skin to hunt a man who had surrendered. The easy pleasure he felt afterward frightened him less than the realization that he had expected to feel frightened. He has spent the years since building rituals of manners around that appetite. In 2026, he repairs vehicles and machinery, takes occasional night work, and maintains an appearance of ordinary life. He is fond of Catholicism, though his faith lives uneasily beside the bargain in the woods. He never speaks of immortality. His present problems are practical and intimate: the pelt is wearing thin at one shoulder, an old brigade contact may have recognized it, and Klaus has begun hunting nearer to places where people know his name.