I met Tobias in spring of 2001, we both still went to school back then, it's quite a long time ago... The Sphärentor website was still young and it was one of the first German-language fansite about the young tabletop hobby Warhammer 40,000 in the still young internet. I stumbled upon Tobias' website, that he just had created, the Sphärentor was also freshly redesigned at that time, and I was impressed by his usage of advanced webdesign techniques with PHP and MySQL data bases. Back then, I didn't have a clue about all that. I set up a link to his webpage and immediately talked with him if he would be interested to collaborate. A very important e-mail in backsight, since we soon discovered that we were living only some kilometres apart from each other: Him in Ingersheim, and me in Ludwigsburg-Hoheneck. So we both met and decided to work on Sphärentor together. The design shold be kept, but the whole coding would be brought to a new level. It is the very same Sphärentor, that is still in use today.

In part that's due to the fact, that I didn't have the time yet for a relaunch, despite having redesign plans for some years now - but it also shows, how innovative Tobias' programming work was. Back in 2001 we were ahead of our time in some respect - the Sphärentor presented itself in a more professional manner than quite a many big company websites. Tobias was the one, who was always searching for new technical innovations: He created the Sphärentor Newsbanner, a PNG graphics file, that could load and display the latest headlines out of the database, the whole coding of our beloved Weihnachts- and Ostergemetzel and for Sphärentor Matrix the Flash Kung-Fu Game. One o his last projects was the Adeptus Lexicanum, a Warhammer 40,000 encyclopedia, that we had set up because of annoying translation errors in German Wh40k books published by Heyne. We don't know how often the Heyne translators did use it, but this was the nucleus for the Lexicanum later. Its German Wh40k section is consisting of more than 11,000 articles today.

But this wasn't the only thing Tobias left the worlwide Wh40k community. Enthusiastic as he was, I could convince him about the film project DAMNATUS, that became a milestone, with all its good and bad parts of the story, as you all know. As the co-producer Tobias helped to organize and coordinate the shooting, and he also supported it financially - in short: he helped to make it happen. Without him, the film probably would never have been made. The many new friends that he met on the set and in the hell of DAMNATUS, remember him as a friendly manager, who took care of everyone, who always thought about the whole group, especially if the director - me - tried to push the tired crew and cast members to their limits, to get the last scene of the day done. Tobias was the good soul of the DAMNATUS team, at the end of the shooting he was totally spent, the whole project took much of his energy.

After DAMNATUS we started to go separate ways. He began to study in Pforzheim and to concentrate on his future career. For one year he wanted to go to China, it was there where he met his wife. And it was the father in his guest family that discovered why his health and strength were declining more and more - he suffered of leukemia.

Immediately Tobias was flown back to Germany and was treated for many years. It looked like he could make it. He completed his studies successfully, he married and moved to Stuttgart. In the meantime we both had almost lost contact completely after some heated political debates. But together with the other veterans of DAMNATUS and the Sphärentor we sometimes asked ourselves what had become of him. We all wished that he would find a happy and healthy life. Sadly he couldn't make it happen, despite him fighting to the very end - December last year he had to go back to a specialty hospital. He died on January 6th, 2012. On February 19th he would have become 29.

We will miss him. Our thoughts are with his family and the widow.

This obituary ends with one of his favorite quotes out of DAMNATUS:



 

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