Immanuel Kant has died.
Martin Lampe, who spent forty years of his life as Kant’s servant, knows that he alone is capable of being Kant’s true intellectual heir. With the master’s death, he is ready to piece together the hundreds of ideas, scribbled on his walls and balled up in his pockets, to assemble his own great philosophical work that will complete and perfect the final masterpiece Kant was writing. He is Martin Lampe, Asker of Questions.
But he is also bitter, exiled for reasons no one knows, and stymied by Wasianski — Ehregott Andreas Christoph Wasianski, a local pastor, a regular at Kant’s dinner table, and a man who wants to ride the great philosopher’s fame by writing a biography of Kant’s last years. Jealous and self-protective, he has taken possession of Kant’s manuscripts, assumed control of the obsequies, and tightened his reign over visitation during the long vigil for Königsberg’s most famous scholar. Martin was shut out, kept away, denied his rights. Kant, his corpse, his legacy would not be shared!
Here is a story of an unequal, and unseemly, class- and power-struggle. There is only one true resolution, only one path out of the agony of bitterness that comes from losing everything.
