I wrote this post for @plainteacup, who made fascinating observations about how the story of the German historian Hubertus Knabe finds its echoes in Franz Bonaparta/Klaus Poppe. She lives in a place where StB/Stasi-adjacent violence is very much present in everyday life; this, of course, shapes the way she reads Monster, and it’s a unique and very informative perspective. Send her some love and Bonaparta-shaped silliness. <3
This post discusses only Monster; anything from Another Monster deserves its own post.
There are two layers of Grimmer I want to discuss in this post: his ex-spy layer and his Magnificent-Steiner layer—two parts of the same Cold War spectacle.
@saint_cruiser shared with me an observation about the way Urasawa constructs his stories and how that shapes the way they’re read and discussed: his love of double meanings, jokes hidden inside jokes, and references folded into other references often goes unnoticed because the surface is already fun enough. He’ll stage an obvious parody or allusion and then use it as cover for something deeper that only appears once you start suspecting there’s more.
Let’s use this to have a look at how Grimmer’s story is shaped and how it affects the characters he’s targeting.
The Magnificent Steiner is, obviously, a Cold War-era children’s cartoon, and it’s built on propaganda logic: a hyper-masculine hero who beats up the bad guys; the bad guys that aren’t neutral so much as made to be instantly legible and easy to hate.
Grimmer watched it as a young boy in Kinderheim 511—it stayed with him ever since, the Magnificent Steiner persona taking over in situations of distress and only loosening its grip once he starts making peace with who he is. Because there never was a Magnificent Steiner. It was always him.
On this level, this can be read as a deeply sad but also hopeful story: the man shaped by Kinderheim 511 and then trained as a spy uses skills acquired in tragic circumstances to bring some good; he helps Tenma, he protects people (especially kids), and he keeps choosing to act like a human being even when he admits he’s not good at expressing emotion. And the hopeful part isn’t that his past disappears—it’s that he slowly learns what he was deprived of in his childhood and that he’s more than the Steiner mask he leans on when things get unbearable.
But here’s another important thing to consider: is his story simply a deconstruction of the archetype and of the propaganda? Or is it an example of how a propaganda-shaped story works—in this case a story about a hero with a tragic past and questionable methods, but with a heart of gold that shows in how he interacts with the characters the audience perceives as positive and the most vulnerable and lovable: orphaned children.
To discuss this, we need to take a closer look at Grimmer’s other layer: the ex-spy.
It’s never told explicitly as Stasi, but it’s another example of the obvious parody: it reads as ex-Stasi coded almost immediately. And because that layer is already entertaining—and, on its own, feels like a complete little Cold War story—there’s not much pressure to look under it. Digging deeper can easily look like overreading, depending on who you’re talking to. Thankfully, this never stopped me; being a reacher when interpreting complex pieces of media is part of the fun. But I digress: let’s get back to the ex-Stasi coding.
The term secret police gets thrown around quite often—especially in the Prague arc, where the people closing in on the tape are repeatedly identified as former Czechoslovak secret police (Inspector Zeman and the two men who abduct and torture Grimmer are spelled out that way). So the label works like a villain badge: it’s meant to make you bristle, and to root for Grimmer as he keeps pushing forward on his truth quest.
The question here is: since the StB is named directly, why isn’t it the case with Grimmer’s background?
I guess that the StB can be discussed head-on—its atrocities are part of the text, there’s no whitewashing there. But if the story used the Stasi label directly in Grimmer’s case, it would get muddy fast: we’d be forced to read the noble ex-spy image against the history it points to, including the fact that some of his methods and instincts don’t come only from his traumatic childhood and the vague spy training. That friction would break the hero packaging, and that’s the kind of friction propaganda logic usually tries to avoid.
Of course, I’m not saying Monster is a pro-Stasi propaganda piece. I’m saying it shows how propaganda logic works: once you fall for the hero image, it becomes easy to flatten the opponents.
And then the story quietly pushes back against that comfort—by humanizing those opponents and letting Grimmer’s weak spots show, but so subtly that it’s easy to miss (or even dismiss).
Also: none of this is a 1:1 Stasi history lesson. This is something Urasawa does on the regular—he mixes elements from reality to create a fictional mirror, not a documentary. That’s part of why Grimmer’s methods don’t map neatly onto one institution: we literally see him beating people up, which (in the pop-cultural shorthand) reads more StB than Stasi (and, again, that overlap is kind of the point). The labels matter, but the story is interested in how similar these systems can be in practice, and in how easily the hero framing can make those methods feel justified.
Through Grimmer’s journey, we see him using something Zersetzung-textured—surveillance, indefinite tailing, and that slow, polite refusal to disengage (I can follow you around forever) that makes normal life impossible—on Mikhail Petrov/Reinhart Biermann; Biermann reacts like someone already too familiar with Stasi-adjacent structures.
Then we see his discomfort when his version of the story doesn’t fit the reality of the children he wants to free:
Grimmer’s expression and methods change drastically when he talks about the tape with Colonel Karel Ranke, with Tenma right there; this isn’t an old man he can corner, it’s someone who’s still part of the system.
There’s also this panel with Konrad from Ruhenheim. On the surface, he’s just clocking an outsider, but his stare—and Grimmer’s sudden shyness—suggests Grimmer has met someone who can read the apparatus in him.
And finally, we have Grimmer and Poppe; Poppe is presented here as the ultimate culprit who needs to be taken to responsibility, but Grimmer’s effort goes nowhere, and both of them die—the truth remains unknown.
But what exactly is the truth, considering the unstable nature (by design) of Poppe’s backstory? Most of what we know about him and his different personas—Franz Bonaparta being the most explored—comes from second-hand accounts.
In the beginning, I mentioned Hubertus Knabe: he is a German historian with a lot of history with the Stasi—not as an ideologue, but as someone who ended up inside its field of vision and then made a career out of reading the files. He’s described how he smuggled banned books into the GDR, got an entry ban (1980–1987), and only later—through his Stasi file—understood how thoroughly surveillance could leak into your personal circle.
There’s also Ulrike Poppe: a real East German dissident who was arrested in December 1983 and held by the MfS/Stasi for six weeks before being released after heavy pressure.
Considering Grimmer’s past mistakes—and the biases he never quite unlearns when he interrogates someone he already sees as a suspect—how far was he from actually grasping Klaus Poppe’s full history?
This post isn’t a gotcha, or a maybe reconsider why you like Grimmer while hating his opponents so much. That kind of rhetoric is nonsensical and has nothing to do with meaningful discussions about examining bias in fandom. It’s also not a see, Poppe was innocent all along—only a maybe, just maybe!, it matters that a man who was falsely painted as a hard criminal could share a moment of recognition with Klaus Poppe, in a story that’s intensely aware of how easy it is to destroy someone through narration.
What interests me is the ambiguity and the messiness—how Urasawa’s worlds invite us to understand what shapes these characters without needing them to be clear mirrors of Good Politics and Our Values.
If anything, I think it shows even more clearly why Grimmer is such a fascinating character—and how it ties into the broader themes of Urasawa’s storytelling.
Sources:
Vertiefung_Methoden_der_Stasi.pdf
„Das ganze Land war ein großes Gefängnis“ - Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
From Stasi to NSA… and back? - The Berliner
Politik: Hubertus Knabe im Interview: Der Historiker über die Aufarbeitung der Stasi-Akten und Spione im Westen
Ulrike Poppe, Teil 2 - dissidenten.eu - Biografisches Lexikon
Bürgerrechtlerin Ulrike Poppe - "Geschichte wird immer von Menschen gemacht"
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I’ll allow myself a small indulgence here: Grimmer/Bonaparta is a killer ship
And we need more OCs/self-insterts/readers x canon in more colors from all over the world. Self-shipping is cool as fuck, and yes, he (or not he) would kiss you.
Mikhail didn’t spend much time anywhere but his home, Hogwarts, or St. Mungos, but he was trying his best to get out there a little bit. The issue with never going out was that he really didn’t know where he was either. Diagon Alley was an adorable little place, thought Mikhail wondered if he preferred Hogsmede, but it was also overwhelming. “Excuse me,” he murmured to the next person he saw, “I was wondering if you could help me find something?” Mikhail was aware of how he came off. At six foot one, wearing all black, an eyepatch, and with a heavy accent, he might be a little intimidating. “There is a...potions shop somewhere here, yes? I’m not...sure what the name of it is.”
Had it been a busier day, Julian would have probably gone unnoticed in his usual wanderings—first past Quality Quidditch Supplies, then another stop at Flourish and Blotts. Even if he wasn’t a voracious reader, that didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy looking into some Quidditch strategems… that he hoped his brother would use.
Julian blinked, only having realized that the eyepatched man was actually talking to him. He had a funny accent and was dressed very much like a wizard—at least more than Julian was. Julian was plainly dressed in comparison, or at least to the effect of casual muggle.
“There’s not really a potions shop,” Julian explained politely, though a little confused himself. He certainly hadn’t need any potions in a while, or at least not one that wasn’t prescribed. “But there’s an apothecary, if you need ingredients for a potion—I think if you want something pre-made, you’ll have to owl order from a specific potioneer? Or St. Mungo’s might have some, if you need a healing potion?”
