Not even the exact date of his birth in Gelnhausen is known (1621 or 1622), and the first decades of his life, as well as the origins of his literary work, remain shrouded in mystery: Who was this Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, the son of a baker, who was thrown into the Thirty Years' War and transformed from a musketeer into a world author, the writer of perhaps the most significant novel in the German language? Since the 1920s, no one has dared to undertake a larger biography of this remarkably modern Baroque writer. Heiner Boehncke and Hans Sarkowicz are literary detectives and passionate Grimmelshausen researchers, whose immense knowledge has led to sensational discoveries of documents and chronicles, historical works, and letters: We can gain a surprisingly fresh perspective on the author of the simplician writings. Fact.