In , a German man who goes by the name Marco came across an article in a Berlin newspaper with a photograph of a professor he recognized from childhood. They were thin, almost nonexistent, a trait that Marco had always found repellent. He was surprised to read that the professor, Helmut Kentler, had been one of the most influential sexologists in Germany. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. Now he was thirty-four, with a one-year-old daughter, and her meals and naps structured his days.
I did what I do every day: nothing, really. I sat around in front of the computer. Marco looks like a movie star—he is tanned, with a firm jaw, thick dark hair, and a long, symmetrical face. As an adult, he has cried only once. He was unemployed. Once, he tried to work as a mailman, but after a few days he quit, because whenever a stranger made an expression that reminded him of his foster father, an engineer named Fritz Henkel, he had the sensation that he was not actually alive, that his heart had stopped beating, and that the color had drained from the world.
He felt both curious and ashamed. In ways that Marco had never understood, Kentler, a psychologist and a professor of social education at the University of Hannover, had seemed deeply invested in his upbringing. But Marco told her he had lived in his foster home until , when he was twenty-one.
A few weeks later, Marco phoned one of his foster brothers, whom he calls Sven. He liked Sven, but felt little connection to him. They had never had a real conversation. But Sven seemed unable to process the information. As a young boy, Marco liked to pretend he was one of the Templars, an order of knights that protected pilgrims to the Holy Land. He was a lively child who occasionally wandered around his Berlin neighborhood unsupervised. At five, in , he crossed the street alone and was hit by a car.
She sent Marco and his older brother to day care in dirty clothes, and left them there for eleven hours. Marco was assigned to live with Henkel, a forty-seven-year-old single man who supplemented his income as a foster father by repairing jukeboxes and other electronics.
