Wolfgang Grimmer's Profile
Character: Wolfgang Grimmer
Series: Monster
Version: Anime version. I am taking Grimmer shortly after he left Dr. Tenma and went into hiding from the European police. (Due to saving his friend Jan Suk from being falsely accused of murder by creating a fake confession letter which stated that he himself was responsible for the serial murders in Prague)
Age: Mid-30s
Gender: Male.
Appearance: Grimmer’s appearance could best be described as eccentric and humorous. He is a very tall middle-aged individual, whose skinniness hides his strength in fighting. He has short sandy blonde hair, which is usually left uncombed and messy, and has a large nose, ears, and honest brown eyes. Grimmer prefers simple, loose and comfortable clothes over anything fancy, and he can generally be found wearing brown pants and a baggy light-brown sweater. The most significant part of his appearance other than his height is probably the massive shoulder bag that he carries around wherever he goes.
Personality: A person first meeting Grimmer would probably be struck by his unusual level of cheerfulness and warmth. Grimmer almost always carries a smile on his face, and does his best to help and support others whenever they are upset or in trouble. The East German seems to show a particular protective tendency towards small children, which may originate from his own difficult childhood and the fate of his own son.
However, Grimmer’s bright personality belies a much, much darker interior.
Having spent his childhood inside of a East German orphanage, Kinderhiem 511, which used psychological reprogramming to turn it’s male children into ‘The Perfect Soldiers”, Grimmer has few childhood memories and severe emotional issues. Other than instinctive fear and anger, Grimmer is unable to feel more complex emotions, such as sadness, happiness, or love. He has had to manually learn “What situations do I smile in, what situations do I frown in, and how exaggerated do I make these emotions?” and he continues to find himself in situations where he is baffled and confused on how he must feel. However, despite his own lack of emotions, Grimmer's determination to save and help others, at often massive costs to his own well-being, proves that does truly care for the safety and feelings of other people. In fact, it is more likely to say that Grimmer's emotional issues have caused him to care more for other people than he does for himself. Furthermore, in rare circumstances, Grimmer’s emotions do return for short periods of time, often without him being aware of it.
Grimmer’s personality takes one more disturbing turn as a result of the orphanage. Whenever he finds himself in a terrifying, or life threatening situation, he “blanks out” and is replaced by a vicious personality which kills everything threatening him in a seemingly super-human fashion. He has no memory of his killings when wakes up, and he has named this side of his personality “The Magnificent Steiner”, after a childhood cartoon which is one of the only things that he can remember.
The “Magnificent Steiner” personality is likely a way for Grimmer to channel the severe rage and violent tendencies he obtained from the orphanage, and he utterly hates releasing that side of himself, although he sometimes seems to trust the Magnificent Steiner to take over and save him when he is in a life-or-death situation. Overall, Grimmer’s disassociation of his violent side into a completely different personality is probably the only way he can remain as a relatively stable and normal person.
Fears: Due to his lack of emotion, Grimmer is out-of-touch with a lot of normal human fears such as alienation and death. However, while he does feel scared in dangerous situations, Grimmer becomes terrified, sickly and potentially violent whenever memories from Kinderhiem 511 return to him. As such, any situation with an even remote resemblance to what he went through in the orphanage would probably be hell for Grimmer.
Weaknesses: Grimmer’s inability to feel emotions can sometimes cause him to be socially naïve, and his the Magnificent Steiner side can make him to charge into suicidal situations without any interest in his own well being. Furthermore, his traumatizing experience in Kinderhiem 511 has caused him to occasionally become severally mentally unstable, and due to his Magnificent Steiner side, he is probably a very dangerous person to make mad. Grimmer insists on not carrying a gun in most situations, which may have to do with his fear of this side releasing itself in the wrong situation.
Strengths/Abilities: Due to his training as a spy, Grimmer is a very knowledgeable and observant person who knows how to calmly act in a huge variety of situations. He has visited many countries, can speak English, French, Spanish and Russian (alongside his natural German) and understands 1990s technology very well. Furthermore, although Grimmer is not the strongest in hand-to-hand combat, he is still capable of defending himself, knows how to use a gun, and has repeatedly shown his ability to take the leadership role in dangerous situations. Meanwhile, his Magnificent Steiner-side is capable of taking down a huge amount of enemies with relative ease. (He took down six armed Czechoslovakian Secret Police at one point!)
History: Little is known about Grimmer’s actual family, since Grimmer himself cannot remember them, but it is likely that Grimmer was the child of an East German couple who were later charged and arrested as “criminals" . After wards, the government had Grimmer placed inside of a East German orphanage, Kinderhiem 511. This particular orphanage was determined to create the “Perfect Soldier” out of all the children inside of it through psychological experimentation and brainwashing, and Grimmer went through severe abuse in the time that he was there. However, due to the nature of the orphanages brainwashing, Grimmer can remember virtually nothing of what happened inside of the orphanage, other than tiny images such as “the musty beds, the stained ceilings, the dark hallways.”. The most significant memory that Grimmer has of the orphanage is a cartoon he was able to watch there, called “The Magnificent Steiner.” He can clearly remember every episode of the series, and since Kinderhiem had stolen his memories and his identity, Grimmer adopted The Magnificent Steiner cartoon as a major part of his identity. It wasn't just a cartoon that he deeply enjoyed, it was symbolically a part of him, and his own emotions and opinions are often expressed through his analysis of the cartoon. However, he cannot remember the final episode of the show, and is often left confused and wondering on what happened to the main hero.
Grimmer’s memories became clear after leaving Kinderhiem 511 at the age 14. He was placed into a new foster family where “somebody pretended to be his mother....somebody pretended to be his father.” and was given a new name, “Wolfgang Grimmer”. Despite being in a more healthy environment, every aspect of Grimmer's life was still planned out and deeply controlled. As a teenager, he was never allowed to leave his neighborhood, and he went to a special school where he went through heavy spy training, and learned to speak Spanish, English, Russian and French. However, he found learning how to express emotions to be the most challenging of all.
In his mid-twenties, while working as a spy disguised as an East German journalist, a woman in his workforce confessed her love to him. Although Grimmer was unable to feel love himself, he accepted and they became married, since Grimmer believed that having a spouse would make him less likely to be caught as a spy. They had a son together, and lived happily for several years. Despite his inability to feel love, Grimmer did his best to be a good family member and a "regular" human being, and it appears he was very successful. They lived happily for several years, until their son suddenly died without warning from an undiscovered medical condition. Although Grimmer had done his best to save the child, he was unable to feel any emotions at all in regards to his child’s death. This was too complicated for Grimmer to understand how to respond, and he was unsure if he was suppost to “grit his teeth, sigh, or scream in despair.” In the end, his wife accused him of “having no heart at all” and divorced him.
Grimmer continued to work as a spy until the fall of the Berlin Wall, where he then became a freelance journalist with a particular interest in human-rights abuse in the Soviet Union, as well as researching into the history of what happened in Kinderhiem 511. Grimmer's experience as a Stasi, and witnessing the human abuses which occurred, probably helped form his future drive against human-rights abuse. In 1998, after helping the falsely accused-serial killer, Dr. Tenma, cross the German-Czech border, Grimmer successfully managed to track down the director of Kinderhiem 511 in Prague, shortly before the director was mortally wounded by a “beautiful blond woman". As the director lay dying, he gave Grimmer a key to a bank safe containing information on “The Monster’s Afterimage”. From there on out, Grimmer became absorbed in Dr. Tenma’s quest to find Johan, a mysterious young serial killer terrorizing Europe.
Sample RP post:
(Just to let you know, Grimmer has a huge thing for picnics in pretty places. Which is why I made mine around picnics.)
As Wolfgang Grimmer finally reached the top of the hill, he took in a deep breath and paused to look towards the scenery below his location. The Czechoslovakia fields surrounding the Elbe River were green and lush, and the Elbe River sparkled from the sunlight hitting it. Grimmer consciously made a smile form on his face at the beautiful sight. He had to make himself smile, since people always smiled at beautiful sights, correct? At the very least, he knew that his son would smile if he saw this.
He dropped his heavy shoulder bag onto the ground with a thud, and watched the scenery for a moment longer before turning his attention to the bag on the ground. Within a few moments he had a picnic sheet spread across the grass, with a bottle of wine and packaged cheese, bread and sausages on top of the sheet. Since he travelled about so much, he never prepared his sandwiches before he went on a picnic. Rather, he just made the food once he found a good picnic spot, and carried the ingredients in his bag. He had been very careful to situate the food so that it would not be crushed by his massive collection of books in the bag- after all, it had been the best food he could find!
The tall East German hummed a tune he had heard on the Czechoslovakian radio as he poured some wine into a glass and put several sandwiches together. He hadn’t eaten anything for most of the day now, so he had to fight against himself from eating the sandwiches before he was done making them all. Once he was done, he stopped his humming and looked into the distance, as he took a large bite from the sandwich.
Delicious food...fine wine...beautiful scenery...to Grimmer, nothing could become more perfect.
And yet, the entire time, he felt no happiness or love at all. Grimmer consciously knew that this situation was perfect, and so he searched it out and did it. After all, doing such things was relaxing and amusing. He was eating delicious food, and delicious food was fun to eat. He was looking at pretty scenery, and pretty scenery was fun to watch.
However, no matter how good of a situation Grimmer found himself in, he was unable to feel the happiness and love that other people seemed to get from good situations.
Once he was done drinking a portion of the wine, Grimmer made certain that he hadn’t accidentally stopped smiling. After all, he was suppost to be happy, and he had to smile if he was happy, correct?