Several months after reading the article, Marco looked up the number for Teresa Nentwig, a young political scientist at the University of Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, who had written the report on Kentler. When he tried to speak, it felt as if his voice didn’t belong to him. 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. “I have a wall, and emotions just hit against it.” He lived with his girlfriend, a hairdresser, but they never discussed his childhood. “If someone were to die in front of me, I would of course want to help them, but it wouldn’t affect me emotionally,” he told me. Marco looks like a movie star-he is tanned, with a firm jaw, thick dark hair, and a long, symmetrical face. I did what I do every day: nothing, really. After he read the article, he said, “I just pushed it aside. Now he was thirty-four, with a one-year-old daughter, and her meals and naps structured his days. Marco had grown up in foster care, and his foster father had frequently taken him to Kentler’s home. In a report submitted to the Senate, in 1988, Kentler had described it as a “complete success.” The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. The article described a new research report that had investigated what was called the “Kentler experiment.” Beginning in the late sixties, Kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. He was surprised to read that the professor, Helmut Kentler, had been one of the most influential sexologists in Germany. They were thin, almost nonexistent, a trait that Marco had always found repellent. The first thing he noticed was the man’s lips. In 2017, 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.
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