Urtinger

Urtinger

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Name	Helmuth Maria Schulze
Birth	11 May 1917
Parents	Conrad Schulze (father), Mariam Schulze (mother)
Spouse	Martina Urtinger (m. 1947, div. 1949; m. 1953, div. 1955; m. 1956, div. 1972; m. 1974, div. 1981; m. 1986, div. 1986; m. 1986, div. 1987; m. 1993, div. 1999; m. 2007)
Career	Beer
Known for	Beer

The ‘German Colossus’ now known only as Urtinger, born 11 May 1917, is an extrafertile German. His greatest and pretty much only skill is his above-average knowledge of beer.

Life

Born Helmuth Maria Schulze on 11 May 1917 in Wasserburg am Inn in southern Bavaria to a purportedly delirious mother and a drunk of a father, who could most definitely not afford actually raising a child, young Helmuth was nursed with beer instead of milk. The only thing stranger than that, perhaps, is the fact that, even as a toddler, his muscular physique put that of most trained athlete and body builders to shame, and he was reportedly able to lift 200 kg at the age of 3 (months).

When questioned on this matter, his mother Mariam would recount an encounter with ‘a weird green man’ she had at a local bar when she was still pregnant: after accidentally brushing against the man’s shoulder, she thought she had suddenly felt her baby grow in size. Unbeknownst to her, that man was in fact the leprechaun Ironheart McSaggins, her contact with whom had initiated an almost imperceptible Mandelbrot Transfer that conferred enough energy upon the fetus to render it extrafertile.

Early Life

As a result of these circumstances, everyone tended to avoid Helmuth; his mother died of illness in 1923, and his father of alcohol poisoning the year after. During all this time, Helmuth had been drinking nothing but beer day in day out. Ever so rarely, when questioned about his drinking habits by concerned bystanders, who would frequently urge him to exchange beer for water, a confused Helmuth would simply walk away in silence, for water was something he only knew as ‘the thing that falls from the sky’ and ‘the thing in the river’. The thought that water was something that could be drunk was utterly foreign to him—as was the case for anything that wasn’t beer.

Attempts to take Helmuth into custody all failed miserably, as his inhuman strength allowed him to brutally maul anyone who would dare try separate him from his beloved beer. Incidentally, coercion by means of violence was also how he would initially obtain his beer, as he had no money to his name, nor a means of obtaining any, nor any knowledge of what money was in the first place. Eventually, people started donating beer to him out of fear. By the age of 10, a venerable cult of beer had grown around him.

Even at this age, owing most likely to his beer-only diet, young Helmuth still struggled to form coherent words, let alone sentences. When questioned by the proprietor of a local bar if he had any desire to go to school to perhaps remedy that fact—for everyone knew that no-one could force him to do so—and after being bribed with a bottle of beer to respond, he answered that the only thing in life that mattered to him was beer. To this, one of the other patrons mockingly commented that Helmuth was so clueless, he didn’t even know what beer was in the first place.

In response, Helmuth recited the complete chemical composition of beer. This left everyone in attendance stunned, as not only had they never heard the boy speak without stuttering for more than 2 seconds, but they also failed to understand so much as a single word he spoke, as his explanation was entirely in his own terms, which he had come up with when he was 4. It was thus not the verbal content of his recitation, but rather the utter surety with which he performed it, that convinced everyone that he knew precisely what he was talking about. Helmuth would later demonstrate the ability to brew beer by himself without any prior instruction, dispelling the last doubts anyone around him still had as to his ability.

Teenage Years

At the age of 12, Helmuth felt that he had exhausted the depths of what local breweries had to offer. Over the course of the next 15 years, he would travel all of Germany in search of the best beer in the world. After a month on the road, he realised that his stunted intelligence was impairing his travels, which he promptly resolved to remedy. As he had no understanding of how one actually obtains knowledge, he discovered that he could simply ask others for help. Moments after he had come to this realisation, Helmuth suddenly sprung at a few passers-by, asking them ‘where knowledge’; they all ran away in fear after directing him to the local library.

At the library, Helmuth realised that he didn’t know how to read. After ‘nicely’ ‘asking’ some of the librarians to teach him how to read, he started perusing all manner of books. Soon after, Helmuth’s intelligence skyrocketed, a feat made possible only by his immense desire to experience new brews of beer. Having learnt all that he felt he needed, he set out to continue his travels.

During this time, Helmuth was both unaffected, and either did not notice, or more likely simply didn’t care about, the ongoing depression, the resulting political shift, and eventual rise of the Nazi party. Even when World War II broke out, Helmuth was unfazed; more frequently than ever, people would try to arrest him or even enlist him in the war, but Helmuth continued to refuse any and all advances.

Involvement in World War II

Come 1944, the Germans knew they were losing the war, and badly. In a last-ditch effort to turn the tides of the war, they dove into the occult. When it became known that Helmuth had been sighted in Cologne, a special task force was assembled rapidly, and an order was issued to bring him to their side, no matter the cost. Having heard that Helmuth enjoys alcohol, the leader of the task force, a self-proclaimed connoisseur of wine whose name is lost to history, decided to offer him some of his favourite beverages.

It took them until late December to track down and make contact with Helmuth, who was camping in a forest in north-western Germany. Unfortunately for them, this proved to be a fatal mistake: More people having yet again come to bother him, coupled with the fact that he felt the beer he had been offered had, for the last 6 or so months, been, in his words, ’grottenschlecht’ (meaning ‘utterly terrible’) meant that his continued annoyance erupted into unbridled fury after he was presented with what he had obviously thought to be beer—they had even gone so far as to call it ‘the good stuff’—when he at length discovered upon its attempted consumption that it was, in fact, something else entirely.

In a matter of seconds, he massacred the task force and subsequently went on a rampage that paranormal historians believe contributed greatly to the allied victory at the Battle of the Bulge. His assault on the German forces would continue until the end of the war, only coming to a rest when he was offered a pint of beer by a British soldier which, though deemed ‘inadequate’ by his German palate, was at least beer, which ended up being enough to pacify him.

After the War

When Helmuth regained his senses after exhausting half the British army’s supply of beer, he felt himself a changed man: Since infancy, his innate fertility had been focused solely towards the consumption of beer, and the strengthening of his body to a point where he could both endure this continued ordeal and possess the means of acquiring even more beer, but over the course of the past months, as a result of continued fighting, it had gradually shifted more and more towards the latter, steadily increasing as it did so, to the point where it reached levels previously thought attainable only with the aid of Gambian coffee. It is thus perhaps not surprising that, upon hearing of Helmuth’s life story, a young Leroy Ginseng would later go on to dub it ‘a Gambian Holiday in beer’.

Helmuth himself, feeling that his fame, which was as much the result of his travels, as of his actions in the war, only served to hinder his exploration of the depths of beer, disappeared quietly from the festivities the allies had prepared for him, reappearing only a year later in Berlin. Having cast aside his old name, he now went by the name of ‘Urtinger’, claiming that ‘it had come to him in a dream’.

To this day, Urtinger keeps mostly to himself, ever continuing to refine his understanding and knowledge of beer. His pretty much only companion in life is his (ex-)wife Martina Urtinger, the daughter of a Bavarian brewer, with whom he has held an often rather tenuous relationship since their first marriage in October of 1947.