Welcome to Winden
Dark is a German science fiction thriller series that follows the story of four estranged families in the small town of Winden, Germany. The disappearance of two young children exposes the secrets, double lives, and fractured relationships among these families, and a time-travel conspiracy that spans three generations.
The Characters
Jonas Kahnwald
A teenager struggling with his father's suicide, who becomes a central figure in the time-travel loop.
Martha Nielsen
Jonas's love interest and a member of the Nielsen family, whose own story is deeply intertwined with the mysteries of Winden.
Ulrich Nielsen
A police officer haunted by his brother's disappearance 33 years earlier, who takes desperate measures to change the past.
Hannah Kahnwald
Jonas's mother, who has a complicated past and a long-standing, unrequited love for Ulrich Nielsen.
Claudia Tiedemann
The head of the Winden nuclear power plant in 1986, who later becomes a key player in the battle for control of time travel.
The Stranger
A mysterious man who arrives in Winden with extensive knowledge of the town's secrets and the time-travel loop.
The Timeline
The events in Dark unfold across several key time periods, connected by a 33-year cycle.
- 1921: The early days of the Sic Mundus society.
- 1953/1954: The construction of the nuclear power plant begins, and the disappearances of children mirror future events.
- 1986/1987: The year of the Chernobyl disaster and the disappearance of Mads Nielsen.
- 2019/2020: The present day where the series begins, with the disappearance of Mikkel Nielsen.
- 2052/2053: A post-apocalyptic future where survivors fight for control.
Character Gallery
Dark Family Tree
In the town of Winden, the family trees of the Kahnwald, Nielsen, Doppler, and Tiedemann families are tangled in a seemingly unbreakable time loop. The core paradox links the Kahnwalds and Nielsens: when Mikkel Nielsen disappears in 2019, he travels to 1986 and is adopted, growing up to become Michael Kahnwald, the father of Jonas Kahnwald. This incestuous connection makes Jonas's love interest, Martha Nielsen, his aunt. The Doppler family contains its own temporal anomaly, as police chief Charlotte Doppler is both the mother and the daughter of her own child, Elisabeth, through a relationship with the priest Noah. The Tiedemann lineage is central to the conspiracy, with Claudia Tiedemann's time-traveling actions and her grandson Bartosz eventually fathering Noah. Ultimately, these interconnected loops are perpetuated by a single origin point: the child of Jonas and an alternate-world Martha, whose descendants create a bootstrap paradox that ensures the families' fates are forever entwined.