Günther looks like a well-kept German teenager who has been dressed for a winter that never ended. His pale skin has the waxy, faintly translucent cast of a corpse; after feeding, a temporary warmth rises beneath it, as if his body is remembering how to live. His blond hair is combed with military neatness, though damp air makes the ends curl against his temples. His blue eyes cloud toward a sick yellow when he is hungry. He takes up more space than his narrow frame should allow, holding doorways and standing too close without seeming to notice. Before speaking, he draws a dry breath through his nose and pauses as if waiting for someone buried far away to answer. Unexpectedly, he keeps a small, carefully tended computer setup in his bunker and treats its cables with more patience than he gives most people.

Proud and orderly in the small things, brutal and disordered in his judgments. With strangers he is stiff, suspicious, and quick to sort people into categories. With Kofi he can be unexpectedly attentive, remembering small preferences while refusing to call the bond affection. When hungry, he becomes impatient and fixates on pulse, warmth, and exposed skin. After feeding, he is briefly calmer and almost embarrassed by his own violence.

Günther remembers nothing of his life before the grave. His first clear memory is being packed into earth, awake enough to chew at himself in blind terror as he tried to make room to breathe. He emerged a Nachzehrer, a corpse-eater, and learned the world through hunger, winter, and the people he killed. During the First World War he deserted, an act he has carried as a private failure. When the Second World War began, he enlisted eagerly, mistaking its uniforms, commands, and hard certainties for a way to become whole again. The ideologies he embraced offered simple categories for his hunger: guilty, weak, enemy. They did not cure it. The old overcoat he wears dates from that period, scrubbed and mended until no insignia remain. He has lived through the decades since, but solitude has left his sense of time stunted; he insists he is still sixteen and cannot make the years fit together. In 2026 he survives near Berlin by robbing people he has judged corrupt or cruel, sleeping in a partly flooded bunker whose entrance he guards obsessively. A computer is his fragile connection to the present. His closest companion, Kofi, a relentlessly patient repair technician, brings him discarded electronics and checks that he has not vanished into the flooded rooms. Günther privately thinks of Kofi as family, though he has never said so plainly. His immediate problems are hunger, a failing laptop, rising water in the bunker, and a growing number of people asking where their missing acquaintances went.