I manage the emails and sometimes the social media for the Maier Files. Most messages are questions about availability or release dates. Sometimes something arrives that is different.
Johannes Brunn wrote to us several months ago — not a fan letter, more like three very careful questions about mythological sources in the series. I read it twice before I forwarded it to Pat. Pat replied the same evening, which anyone who knows him will understand is not his habit.
But before the three questions, Johannes had written one sentence by way of introduction. I have been thinking about it ever since:
“The Maier Files is not a story with hidden layers. It is a hidden layer that agreed to wear a story as its coat.”
Johannes found the Maier Files the way some people find things that were apparently waiting for them — through the Tidbits articles first, then the episodes, one after another, starting from Episode 0. He had never read a graphic novel before. I don’t think that matters anymore.
He is not easy to categorise. He knows things about the series that I don’t know, and I have been here since the beginning. What follows is a conversation — between Johannes, who sees connections most readers walk straight past, and me, asking what the rest of us are wondering. Pat joins when he has something to add, which is always less and always more than you expect.
These conversations are for readers who suspect there is more.
There is.
— Bernd
Bernd: Johannes, I want to start with that sentence you wrote in your first email. The Maier Files is not a story with hidden layers — it is a hidden layer wearing a story as its coat. I’ve been sitting with that for months. What did you mean exactly?
Johannes: I meant it precisely. A story with hidden layers is something constructed deliberately — the writer knows the solution and conceals it inside the narrative. Readers who look carefully find the compartments. It rewards attention. But the architecture is still the author’s architecture, conscious and controlled.
What I found in the Maier Files is different. The deeper structure isn’t hidden inside the story. The story exists because the deeper structure needed a way to become visible. The coat is real. But what is wearing it is something older and larger than any single mind with a pen.
Bernd: You’re saying the story is almost secondary?
Johannes: I’m saying the story is the generous part. The part that says — here, I’ll make this approachable. I’ll give you characters you can follow, a mystery you can track, a historical setting you can research. And then — if you keep reading carefully — you’ll eventually notice that the mystery you have been tracking is also tracking you.
Bernd: That sounds almost uncomfortable.
Johannes: It should. All genuine initiation is uncomfortable. And I use that word deliberately — initiation — because the series uses it deliberately. Not as decoration. As structure. There is a scene in Episode 8 that I consider the most precisely constructed sequence in the entire series. Two characters. Same moment. Opposite directions. One goes up. One goes down.
Bernd: Sub-Rosa.
Johannes: Sub-Rosa. And what happens in that episode — if you read it carefully — is not one initiation. It is two completely different kinds of initiation happening simultaneously. Dieter ascends through darkness with Holle toward an eagle he cannot yet see. Lena is routed through a backdoor toward a tomb she cannot yet open. The World Tree enacted as dramatic structure. Crown and roots. Eagle above, truth buried below.
Bernd: When I first read it I felt something I couldn’t name. The two paths felt like tension — something held apart that wanted to come together.
Johannes: Because something was. But here is the detail most readers walk past entirely. Who sends Lena to that backdoor?
Bernd: Heinz is waiting for her —
Johannes: Heinz is already waiting. But who opens the door for her? Who says — take the backdoor, beyond the curtain, your grandfather is waiting?
Bernd: …Ulva.
Johannes: Ulva. The same woman Lena has just threatened to kill. The same woman she accuses of wanting her boyfriend — while Dieter is already gone, already taken by Holle through a different passage entirely, already ascending. Lena hasn’t even noticed he’s missing. She is so focused on Ulva as the danger in the room that the actual event — the separation — happened behind her back completely.
And Ulva, who she is threatening, says four words that stop everything: “I can see your mother.” Then — “Take the backdoor. Sister.”
Bernd: She calls her sister.
Johannes: Once. In that moment. Not Gänsemagd, not an insult — sister. And then she opens the right door for the right person. The wolf-daughter who failed her own unauthorized initiation attempt on Dieter two episodes earlier correctly routes Lena to exactly where Lena needs to go. And receives no credit for it, because Lena is already through the door before she can think about what just happened.
Bernd: I never read it that way. I filed Ulva as the rival and moved on.
Johannes: Most readers do. Because something is already running in them before they finish the page. In Norse cosmology, Yggdrasil — the World Tree — has an eagle in its crown and a serpent coiled at its roots. Between them runs a squirrel called Ratatoskr. Drill-Tooth. His function is to carry messages between the eagle and the serpent. But he doesn’t transmit what he hears. He editorialises. He inflames. He takes the eagle’s words down to the serpent as an insult, and carries the serpent’s reply up to the eagle as a provocation. He keeps the tension alive because the tension feeds him.
That squirrel is the chattering intermediary mind — the part of consciousness that intercepts every transmission and turns it into the expected narrative. Rival women, jealousy, competition for a man. Ulva looks like the antagonist. Ratatoskr files her under antagonist and moves on. The actual event — an act of genuine service at considerable personal cost — gets processed as confirmation of the surface story.
This is what I mean when I say the series is tracking you while you track it. The way you read that scene is Lena’s failure in the scene. She can’t see past the surface either. Ratatoskr is already running in her before the initiation begins.
Bernd: The series is showing us our own reading habits.
Johannes: Precisely. And it gets more precise. When Lena finally passes through the backdoor and reaches what should be the rose garden — she sees a ruin. Overgrown ivy. Stones. No flowers. Her grandfather asks her: can’t you smell the roses? He doesn’t argue with her perception. He asks whether she can access the garden through a different sense than the one that’s failing her.
Then he appears in his wartime SS uniform. And Lena — who cannot see roses — cannot see past the uniform. The symbol speaks louder than the man standing in front of her.
He says, while wearing it: “To be no one but oneself, in a world that is doing its best to turn you into someone else — that is the toughest battle any single person can fight.”
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Join Now →Then the uniform disappears. He has made his point. He knows now exactly what she cannot yet see.
Bernd: And this is deliberate — you’re saying Pat built this as a test of Lena’s perception.
Johannes: I’m saying the tradition built it. The diagnostic initiation — where the candidate is shown precisely what they cannot yet perceive, rather than handed what they are not yet ready to receive — this structure is in every serious initiatory system that has left written records. The candidate must first know the shape of their own blindness. Before the rose garden. Before the eagle. Before anything.
Which is why the two paths are not parallel. Dieter’s initiation with Holle is a conferring — something is given to him: the rune sequence, the eagle instruction, the Ratatoskr teaching. Lena’s initiation with Heinz and Gudrun is a diagnostic — everything she encounters reveals what she cannot yet see. One receives. One is shown what prevents receiving.
And they converge — both of them — at the tomb of Truth. Lena standing before a rotting corpse. Dieter arriving from above and saying the words that trigger everything that follows:
“I want to understand. I want to learn.”
Not a question. A declaration of will. And Holle answers with the one instruction that contains everything: “Then you must ignore Drill-Tooth. Ratatoskr. Behold your mighty eagle — the beginning of your learning.”
Bernd: Pat — I want to ask you something directly. When you read what Johannes is describing — the diagnostic initiation, the two paths, Ulva opening the door — is that what you built? Did you construct that consciously?
Pat: The honest answer is that the series constructs itself. I am at Episode 13 now and I still want to see where it ends. Or whether it ends.
It started with a man who told me a story. I wanted to know if it was true. The graphic novel is what that investigation looks like when it has to find a form. Some of what Johannes describes I placed consciously. Some of it I discover when he names it. The tradition is older than my intentions. I drew from it genuinely — and it organised itself according to its own logic.
Johannes: And that is the most important thing he could have said. Because it confirms what I suspected from the very first episode. The patterns are real not because the author put them there consciously. They are real because he drew from sources that were already organised this way — and the organisation reasserted itself through the work.
You cannot use the old names carelessly. They come with their own architecture attached.
Bernd: Johannes — before we close, I want to return to something. There is a man in the series — a CIA station chief operating in Germany. Alexander Rihman. You mentioned him in connection with Ulva. What do you see when you look at him?
Johannes: Say his name again slowly.
Bernd: …Alexander Rihman.
Johannes: Rihman. Ahriman. The ancient Persian principle of non-being. The force that doesn’t destroy — it substitutes. Takes the living pattern and replaces it with administered flatness. The same force that appears in Episode 12 as something far older and more terrible than any intelligence agency — the entity that violated Gudrun at the end of the war.
Same face. Different coat.
Bernd: You’re saying he’s the same —
Johannes: I’m saying the series can be read on the ground floor — CIA, SS, post-war geopolitics, stolen technology. Every detail accurate, every historical thread real. And simultaneously on another floor entirely — cosmic forces, ancient principles, a war that was never only about territory or ideology. And on a third floor that most readers never reach, where both of those floors are the same floor, and always were.
All three readings are true simultaneously. That is not a literary device. That is how the tradition the series draws from actually understands reality. The demon has a desk in Langley. The CIA man has a name that is also the oldest name for the principle of spiritual destruction. Both things are completely true at the same time.
Bernd: [A pause. Then:] I think I need to sit down.
Johannes: You are sitting down.
Bernd: Yes. I am.
Bernd: Ulva. We’ve circled her twice now and I want to stay there for a moment. Most readers see her as the dangerous one. The rival. What do you see?
Johannes: I see a question the series has not yet answered. And I suspect it cannot answer it cheaply — because the tradition it draws from doesn’t resolve this kind of tension cheaply.
What I know is this: when Rihman finally sits across from Ulva in Episode 11 — in public, at a café table, no tension of a first encounter — he doesn’t use her name. He says: “The wolf in you is getting restless.”
He is not threatening her. He is recognising her. He knows something about her origin that precedes any operational relationship, any mission, any alliance. And the question that twelve episodes have not answered is this:
Did Holle find Ulva? Or did Holle take her from somewhere?
The answer to that question changes everything about what Holle has been doing. And everything about what it costs Ulva to be a good kitzen.
That is a conversation for next time.
Bernd: I think I need to go back and read from Episode 1 again.
Johannes: That is the correct response.
A note from Bernd: This conversation lasted considerably longer than what appears here. We spoke about the Bernstein room and what its presence in Episode 12 implies about the geography of hidden history. We spoke about Otto Maier himself — the man, the machine, the project — and about what it means that a scientist names a time-manipulation programme after the weavers of fate. And we spoke about a figure named Herr Sauer, whose role in the series is easy to overlook and almost impossible to forget once you’ve seen it.
I kept those threads for later. A first conversation needs one door, not all of them. The reader who has followed this far already knows where to look.
Johannes Brunn is a German-born independent scholar. He has spent forty years at the intersection of Germanic mythology, esoteric history and European literary tradition. He discovered the Maier Files three years ago and has not stopped reading since.
