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.
Jonas is the son of Hannah and Michael Khanwald and starts off the show as a quiet somber teenager.
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.
When he returns to school, he finds out that Martha has now started dating Bartosz and that his classmate Erik Obendorf is missing.
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.
[8] 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.
[9] Jonas lives in the future for the next 7 months and stays away from a cult in the woods led by an adult Elisabeth Doppler and teenage soldier Silja.
The cult has sanctioned the area surrounding the now-destroyed Winden Nuclear Power Plant as a dead zone which no one is allowed to enter.
[10] With a lack of fuel to power the portal, Jonas steals some from the cult but is caught returning to the dead zone.
On Adam's orders, he uses the God Particle to travel back to 20 June 2019, with a mission to stop his father Michael from committing suicide.
At that moment, an elder Claudia Tiedemann enters and tells Jonas that Adam manipulated him into convincing Michael to commit suicide in the first place.
He then spends the next three months trying to create the God Particle, and on 26 September 2020 is joined by adult Claudia, who has been living in 2020 ever since Jonas bought her to the year in June.
Jonas speaks to Charlotte and tells her that Noah was responsible for the deaths of Erik Obendorf, Mads Nielsen and Yasin Friese.
Martha arrives looking for Hannah and instead meets Jonas, who reveals himself to her by recounting a previous encounter the two had when he was 35 years younger.
[c][15] On the day of the apocalypse, wishing to prevent Martha's death he holds her at gunpoint and forces her into the Doppler bunker, telling her not to leave otherwise she will die.
On Noah's command, he saves Magnus, Franziska and Bartosz using the time machine before the apocalypse hits, taking them to 1888.
Due to the lack of nuclear energy in the 19th century and the time machine having run out of fuel, Jonas and his childhood friends are trapped in the past.
Jonas, now going by Adam, kills his mother and uses the God Particle to take Silja to the year 2041 where his younger self will eventually meet her.
He recruits Noah back into Sic Mundus and gives him the task of creating the first time machine using Helge's help.
[19] In June 1921, Adam gives Noah the task of finding the missing pages of Claudia's notebook ahead of the apocalypse.
He also tells teenage Noah to kill Bartosz, as he can sense his childhood friend is losing faith in Sic Mundus.
[14] Adam and Sic Mundus set up their headquarters in 2053 where he meets with the alternate Martha Nielsen, cutting a deal with her that if she manipulates his past self, he will tell her the origin which he found from the final pages.
[19] An elder Claudia appears and tells Adam that alternate Martha's elder self, self-named “Eva”, used quantum entanglement during the apocalypse, when there was a large amount of caesium in the air, to split alternate Martha into two realities, one where she becomes Eva and one where Adam kills her.
Claudia also reveals there was an origin world where Tannhaus created time travel in an effort to prevent the death of his son and daughter-in-law.
In this world, Jonas finds many things are different such as Franziska being deaf instead of her sister Elisabeth, or Martha is dating Killian Obendorf instead of Bartosz.
Adam takes him to Eva's world and explains that Tannhaus created time travel and that Jonas and the alternate Martha have to stop him.
They are brought to a place between the three worlds, where Jonas sees a child version of alternate Martha after being separated from her teenage self.
Jonas and Martha eventually reunite and use the machine to travel to the origin world, where they appear in front of Tannhaus’ son Marek and his wife Sonja.
On writing the character's fate, series director Odar chose to view Jonas's sacrifice as a happy ending stating that "I always liked the idea that there are two components who are opponents, fighting each other all of the time, actually having to realize that they are not important.
"[30] Brian Sheridan from Comic Book Resources stated that Hofmann gives the second best performance in the show behind Julika Jenkins writing that "[he] could not have been better as the most prominent version of Jonas' character.