Michael Stockhausen

Michael Stockhausen, a man who is 42 years old. He is attractive in appearance, He has deep brown eyes, slightly long dark hair that is curly and he often wears it slicked back. He has a moustache and a small beard, more like stubble, and the accent of his voice, due to his origin, was German, but there is also a lisp. Michael has a very complex character; he can give up friendship for his own purposes, but also bend over backwards to his superiors just to climb the career ladder. He may pretend to be a smart scientist, a fearless hero, but he himself is still a coward and a scoundrel. Deputy Head of Enterprise 3826, right hand and aide of Dmitry Sechenov. Mikhael Stockhausen (Goldenzweig) is a German scientist of Jewish origin who worked as a doctor in a secret Berlin laboratory during the war. He survived the first outbreaks of the “Brown Plague” in a dying Berlin and was rescued by Soviet soldiers. Using forged documents, he changed his name in an attempt to avoid punishment for the crimes of the Reich. Before infection, he possessed a phenomenal memory, as noted by his colleagues; however, after the onset of the illness, he lost this ability and never demonstrated it again (though he did not regret it). Thanks to his persistence, cunning, and a keen sense for the moods of his superiors, Stockhausen quickly rose through the ranks, displaying both managerial talent and a gift for intrigue. As a scientist from the German SSR, he ended up among the personnel of the Enterprise through a quota system and quickly earned Sechenov’s respect. At present, he strives to be useful to the leadership while not forgetting his own benefit. He is the one behind Petrov’s arrest—having become one of the first people Petrov trusted, he immediately reported him. The biography of Mikhael Stockhausen is a complex construct made up of several layers of half-truths, omissions, and outright lies. While his file at the Enterprise merely leaves out some less flattering details, his public image—portraying him as a principled and consistent anti-fascist and an ideological communist—is as far from reality as possible. Although in public Stockhausen wears the mask of a benevolent and friendly intellectual, beneath it lies a cold-blooded and ruthless schemer, willing to step over others to achieve his goals and evaluating every action solely in terms of the benefit it brings him. To those familiar with the less appealing side of his character, Stockhausen comes across as an unprincipled sycophant unworthy of trust. Thus, when asked about the reasons for his negative attitude toward Mikhael, P-3 responds with a sarcastic rhetorical question: “So he used to march in formation through Berlin, and now he’s become a model communist?” Mikhael’s credo is all-encompassing opportunism: his successful service to the Nazi regime during the height of the Third Reich did not prevent him, after the fall of the “Vaterland,” from just as successfully breaking into the scientific elite of the Soviet state, all while verbally declaring his commitment to the ideals of communism. At the same time, he remains equally distant both from the ideas of Marxism–Leninism that dominate his new homeland and from the utopian transhumanism of his immediate superior—science, for this pragmatic German, is merely a means of securing his own prosperity.