Jonas Kahnwald

Jonas Kahnwald is a fictional character and one of the protagonists in the German science fiction thriller show Dark (created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese), portrayed by Jonas Gerzabek as a child, Louis Hofmann as a teenager, Andreas Pietschmann as an adult, and Dietrich Hollinderbäumer as an elderly man. He appears in 25 out of 26 episodes, making him the character with the most appearances in the show.

Jonas is the son of Hannah and Michael Kahnwald and starts off the show as a quiet somber teenager. After his father's suicide, Jonas unravels a rift in time in the Winden caves and begins his time travel journey. He returns as an adult to mentor his younger self and is referred to as The Stranger. After being trapped in 1888, Jonas tries to create a time travel machine so he can find the origin point of the time loop. He becomes physically scarred from this and begins going under the name of Adam.

The character is considered one of the show's best and both the character and Hofmann's performance have received positive reviews.

Jonas is born in 2003 to Hannah and Michael Kahnwald.

On 20 June 2019, a teenage Jonas goes to the lake with his friends Bartosz Tiedemann and Martha and Magnus Nielsen. At the lake, Jonas and Martha find a pendant with Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, on it. Jonas gifts the pendant to Martha before having to run off to help Ines Kahnwald, who he believes to be his paternal grandmother, with technology. That night, Jonas goes to Martha's house to celebrate her parents' 25th anniversary, where Martha returns the pendant to him and the two make love. The next day, Jonas's father Michael commits suicide by hanging himself.

After Michael's death, Jonas leaves the town of Winden to stay in a psychiatric ward. He returns in November 2019 and starts therapy with Peter Doppler. When he returns to school, he finds out that Martha has now started dating Bartosz and that his classmate Erik Obendorf is missing. That night, Jonas goes with Bartosz, Martha, Magnus and Martha's younger brother Mikkel to find Erik's missing drug stash near the Winden Caves. After hearing a strange sound coming from the caves, the group runs away from the caves. When they all regroup they find that Mikkel has gone missing.

Over the next few days, Jonas finds a map of the caves that belonged to his father which reads "Where is the Crossing?" The next day, the map is marked with a line revealing a passageway through the caves, and a day later Jonas receives a letter from an unknown person. The letter is his father suicide's note which reveals that the day Mikkel went missing, he travelled back in time to 1986 and became Michael Kahnwald. The next night, Jonas goes to the caves and travels through the passageway and arrives in 1986 where he runs into his mother who at this time is 14-years-old. In the morning, Jonas goes to the hospital where he sees Mikkel talking to a young Hannah. His plan to take Mikkel back to 2019 is stopped when a stranger appears and tells him that if he takes Mikkel back, Mikkel would never become his father and he would never exist.

Jonas returns to 2019 and blows off Martha after she kisses him in the rain as he now realizes Martha is his aunt. He visits Ines Kahnwald, who took Mikkel in when he arrived in 1986, and she gives him Michael's suicide letter, which Jonas thought he had burned. Jonas once more travels to 1986 with the intention of taking Mikkel back to 2019. When Jonas arrives at the hospital, he is kidnapped by Noah and an adult Helge Doppler, who locks him in the Doppler bunker. The Stranger meets him again on the other side of the bunker door and reveals that he is Jonas from 33 years in the future. He keeps Jonas locked in the bunker. As Jonas struggles to get out, a wormhole opens connecting a child Helge from 1953 to him. When the two touch, Jonas is sucked into the wormhole and ends up in the year 2052 where Winden has been partially destroyed by an apocalypse.