Claus Störtebeker

He was a pirate who became a legend in his own time. In the turbulent Baltic Sea of the fourteenth century, Claus Störtebeker abandoned the merchant trade to join the Vitalienbruders, a brotherhood of men who took up arms against the greedy nobles strangling the region's ports. Alongside his companions Heino Wichmann and Gödeke Michael, Störtebeker fought not for treasure but for justice, seizing from the rich to feed the poor, earning a reputation that made merchants pray and barons tremble. Georg Engel traces this legendary figure from his humble origins through his years of audacious raids to his inevitable reckoning in Hamburg in 1402. What emerges is both a rollicking adventure across the Hanseatic world and a meditation on how ordinary men become immortal when they dare to challenge the powerful. The novel breathes life into a figure who has haunted German folklore for six centuries, asking what it means to be a criminal when the laws themselves serve only the privileged.