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“
There's nothing special about being born. Not a thing. Most of the universe is just death, nothing more. In this universe of ours, the birth of a new life on some corner of our planet is nothing but a tiny, insignificant flash. Death is a normal thing—so why live?
„
~ Johan Liebert tormenting Miloš, an orphan, while disguised as his sister Anna.
“
I was born in a town that was straight out of a fairy tale. Many people died there, and when I walked away, I held hands with my other self. To me, it seemed like we were the only two people in the world. Neither one of us possessed a real name.
„
~ Johan Liebert terrorizing Schuwald.
“
I woke up from the dream. There were so many visions I had of the end, but now I'm picturing a different ending altogether; a clearer vision of the true ending.
„
~ Johan Liebert to his henchman Horst Grossman immediately before killing him.
Johan Liebert is the titular main antagonist of the manga and anime series Monster and the overarching antagonist of the light novel sequel Another Monster.
He is a ruthless, seemingly emotionless, and psychopathic serial killer whose life was saved by Kenzo Tenma as a child. He is also the twin brother of Anna Liebert, aka Nina Fortner. Johan has stated that his one true goal is to be the last one alive when the world ends—but upon rediscovering a children's book that appears to have played a pivotal role in his monstrous nature, he instead set his mind on committing the "perfect suicide," i.e. dying without leaving behind any evidence of his existence (with the exception of Dr. Tenma and Anna's memories of him in order to destroy their faith in humanity).
For most of his life, Johan had been working towards the very end of human society step by step through his corruptive influence over others to become the last human alive at the end of the world.
He frequently torments Nina psychologically to subvert her sense of identity, disguising himself to feel what it is like to be her and use it to further his plans; this involved killing her adoptive parents before ultimately attempting to corrupt her into becoming a killer just like him.
He is a manipulative psychopath who frequently shows superficial kindness, compassion, politeness, and empathy to keep a low profile and/or to manipulate and corrupt others, such as with Christof Siervenich and Roberto, which were done so Johan can corrupt them into fellow criminals like him.
Despite the multiple horrid events in Johan's life, he refuses to take any chance offered to him by Tenma and Nina to help him and change his ways as many other villains in the series have while working to strip himself of anything that makes him human in his words "to be as dark as possible" and shatter Tenma's idealism, who he knows was piecing his entire life story together to strike him down in cold blood.
Overall, he lives up to the manga/anime's name as a living force of evil (complete with parallels/allusions to the Antichrist as opposed to the Messiah that Tenma symbolizes), which brings out the absolute worst in people, spreads as much evil and suffering as possible, and champions the downfall of all human society and morality.
Background[]
With alarming premeditation and calculation for his age, he murdered his caretakers in cold blood despite being homeless due to wanting no one to find out where he or Anna was.
He infamously caused the 511 Kinderheim massacre, once more as a child, by insidiously manipulating and provoking the orphans and instructors into inciting chaos—which culminated in the orphanage burning down and Johan tossing an oil rag into its fires, ominously watching as dozens of other children die by either killing each other or burning alive.
He murdered his foster parents, the Lieberts, before successfully prompting a traumatized Anna to shoot him herself.
He tortured Helmut Wolf by organizing an event where his wife, children, and friends all die one after the other, all the while forcing him to watch. This reduced Wolf to a broken and paranoid wretch just to make him experience the same solitude that Johan did—even though Wolf saved him and his sister from a near-death experience.
Although Wolf was a neo-Nazi, what he was subjected to was not only irrelevant to that, but as the story unambiguously portrays, is cruel even for him.
Present[]
He murders Tenma's boss and coworkers, Director Heinemann, Dr. Oppenheim, and Dr. Boyer, with poisoned candy, ostensibly as a "favor" to Tenma for saving his life, simply because Tenma had unwittingly told Johan that Heinemann would be better off dead—despite this declaration stemming from anger and resentment rather than genuine malice—thereby incriminating Tenma for the murders due to his severe demotion before this.
While Director Heinemann and his subordinates were thoroughly repugnant for their corruption and disregard for the lives of their patients, Johan did not kill them solely for this reason but to invalidate Tenma's belief that all lives are equal, as Johan brings it up when Tenma tells him that killing is wrong and tells Tenma that his career was only salvaged thanks to the murders.
He encourages Reinhard Dinger and other serial killers to commit murderous acts with little to no effort, seemingly bearing a corrupting influence on a nearly supernatural level.
He organizes a successful money laundering business only to abandon it, which in turn instigates another massacre.
He hires serial killers from all around Germany, including Adolf Junkers and his two partners, to dispose of all of his former foster parents—only to backstab the trio by disposing of them once they've outlived their utility. Junkers initially survives, but only to later be executed by Johan due to Junkers being a loose end, just as he was on the path to redemption and recovery.
In doing so, Johan also torments and possibly attempts to corrupt Tenma—a purely good character—by insinuating that the blood of Heinemann, Oppenheim, and Boyer is on his hands and that their deaths benefitted him due to his promotion to fill their place, suggesting to Tenma that disposing of those in one's way is acceptable.
He corrupted children with his worldviews and convinced them to jump from rooftops as a game, which they're told to try again should they survive. It's highly likely that many of them either become critically wounded or do not survive.
He habitually murders his subordinates or any he sees as loose ends or outlived their usefulness (e.g. Horst Grossman later on) or neglects their potential deaths (e.g. his sole surviving disciple, Christof); even his most loyal henchman, Roberto, is not exempt from this callousness when he dies before an indifferent Johan's eyes without having his end of the bargain fulfilled, as he is ultimately nothing more to Johan than a pawn.
He hires Detective Messener and Michael Müller to murder the Fortners, Anna's (now Nina's) new family, upon luring her out of their domicile. This would also lead to Jacob Maurer's death, as he was there to investigate the Fortners when Messener and Müller went to kill them.
He is so utterly dangerous and misanthropic that when offered a chance to join a gang of Neo-Nazis in a meeting with Professor Goedelitz, Johan murders them all to drive home how he has no interest in the Nazi ideology due to looking down on all humans with equal contempt.
While he does help Karl Neuman reunite with his father Hans Georg Schuwald, even though he could've easily claimed to have been Schuwald's son and the latter would've believed him, it's almost certain that Johan intended for this to be an opportunity to gain Schuwald's trust to work him into a bigger plan.
He initially plans to have Schuwald assassinated by his hitman Roberto so that he may seize control of Germany's economy, manipulating murderers to target those close to Schuwald to get closer to him by taking their place and earning his trust, in addition to driving Edmund Fahren to suicide for no apparent reason. His reason for nearly subjugating the economy is to set his aforementioned apocalyptic initial plan in motion.
When recovering alcoholic and detective Richard Braun is hired to investigate Fahren's suicide and begins to draw connections between Johan and other unsolved murders, Johan retaliates by meeting Richard in a bar and, veiled as research for a college thesis, confronting him on the latter's execution of a 17-year-old serial rapist and murderer, citing various sections from the Convention on the Rights of the Child to put the detective in the wrong—initially under a neutral, understanding façade.
This façade gradually erodes as instead of simply luring him somewhere so he could kill him, Johan does so while slowly and ruthlessly hammering away at Richard's psyche by planting seeds of guilt, asking Richard how he intends to look his daughter Rosemary in the eye the next day when her father is a murderer and a coward, and finally manipulating him into drinking again—which is followed by Richard either jumping/falling off the rooftop Johan has lured him to or being pushed off, killing him, despite Johan's knowledge that Richard was to see Rosemary the next day for the first time in years, with his wife and daughter grieving his death afterward. This is done not to deliver justice for the otherwise morally upright Richard's past crime but simply for his interference with Johan's plans.
After murdering Blue Sophie, Johan gives drug money to a prostitute near the crime scene for seemingly no other reason than to further ruin her life by having her abuse more drugs, and possibly also pragmatism to dispel suspicion by rendering her an unreliable witness due to her addiction, if not simple hush money.
He sets the highly occupied Munich University Library full of elderly people ablaze while instilling terror into Schuwald, killing a few and injuring many while burning myriads of books simply because of his loss of interest in murdering Schuwald. Since he refuses to abandon his plans for Schuwald without ruining the business tycoon's life in some way, he spitefully traumatizes him and shows him scenes from Hell—both in the library and in Johan's very eyes.
When encountered by Tenma at the burning library, he taunts the doctor into killing him by pointing at his forehead.
Upon embarking to Prague in search of a 511 Kinderheim tape from his youth, Johan murders and deceives people—including Reinhart Biermann, the repenting headmaster of said orphanage who, up until his death, was raising children in a manner opposite to that of his past experiments—while disguised as his sister Anna, deliberately gaslighting and potentially incriminating her.
In said disguise, he frequents a local bar and acquaints himself with Detective Jan Suk, who is enamoured with him due to his convincing appearance as Anna; however, upon extracting the required information from Suk, Johan poisons his boss and other policemen involved with the Czech Secret Police attempting to acquire and sell the tape that Johan seeks, which deflects blame and suspicion onto the innocent Suk due to the similar poisoning method utilized by said police.
To exonerate Wolfgang Grimmer from false suspicion of murdering Biermann, several of the orphans who were previously in the latter's custody band together to find the "mysterious blonde lady" (Johan), who was present at the scene and presumed to be a witness—and one of the boys, Miloš, is successful. What follows is one of Johan's most wanton and reasonless acts of cruelty. When still disguised as Anna, he tells Miloš that he should find his lost mother at a nearby red-light district but bombards his hopes with the notions that his mother abandoned him because he was never wanted and that all life is insignificant; he then sends the boy through said district, wherein he witnesses several forms of human depravity, including rape, which—coupled with his inevitable failure to find his mother—tortures the boy enough to drive him to the brink of suicide. Although this is stopped through Tenma and Grimmer's narrow intervention, Miloš is still very visibly traumatized and implied to be corrupted by Johan when he squishes a moth unprovoked, and his fate thereafter is unspecified.
Even though he did save Grimmer from death and clear him of the crime, it's never implied he did this out of genuine care or respect for him. If anything, it was most likely for pragmatic and/or selfish reasons.
He burns down the Red Rose Mansion, which contains a painting of his mother, in his endeavour to erase his past and, ultimately, himself. He also met Hermann Führ while doing so, which indirectly inspired him to kill people himself, thereby instigating the events of Another Monster.
After disposing of his henchman Horst Grossman, he visits the remote village of Ruhenheim, wherein he instigates a massacre by playing on the doubts, fears, and innate greed associated with human nature, destroying its peace and killing many more in the process. He intends to have its entire population dead at its own hands.
He rejects Anna's forgiveness for all of his actions during their final encounter, immediately before holding a nearby child at gunpoint just to coerce Tenma to shoot him and fulfil his goal of a "perfect suicide" and invalidate his idealism.
In the ambiguous ending of the story, Johan appears to escape the police in the hospital he was sent to following his second brain surgery, indicating that in the end, he receives no comeuppance for his long list of atrocities. It is also possible that he is still in a comatose state, but regardless, his ultimate fate is unknown, and he likely evaded justice.
What Prevents Him from Being Pure Evil?[]
While others characters in the series have suffered similarly and came out nowhere near as bad as him, Johan is still genuinely tragic due to numerous traumatic experiences in his past that continue to haunt him:
He and his sister were conceived as a result of a cruel eugenics experiment by Franz Bonaparta to create superior leaders. From an early age, he was dressed as his sister to create the impression his household only had one child and given the book The Monster Who Didn't Have A Name to serve as brainwashing. When he accidentally read the book while browsing a library on a whim, he underwent a panic attack as a result of the PTSD it triggered by remembering it, demonstrating that the experiences still affect him.
He was part of a choice Bonaparta forced his mother into—to keep one of her children and give the other up for his experiment, in which Johan was plagued with the doubt if his mother actually intended to spare him or if she confused him for Anna. This even causes Johan in that his change of plans was focused on trying to destroy Bonaparta, as he saw him as the reason for why he is the way he is.
After Anna was experimented on, her memories were projected onto him as a result of his empathetic bond with her, resulting in him believing he had witnessed the events that she had.
After the experiment, his mother vanished from the apartment they previously stayed at, forcing the twins to travel alone without assistance and nearly die in the mountains, while Johan was left without proper guidance for his budding violent tendencies.
He was later sent to Kinderheim 511, a depraved orphanage where orphans were subjected to multiple experiments and where he lost the memories he had of his past in Czechoslovakia. This resulted in him losing any sense of his identity and any feeling of intrinsic value he had beforehand.
Overall, his experiences resulted in him believing life has no value and that he and everyone else were worthless. Several characters in Another Monster comment that had he been raised in a better environment, he would not have turned out the way he did. When told by Nina that she would still forgive him, he looks down solemnly before concluding that he's come too far and he could never amend for his actions, which shows he may have felt genuine regret to an extent.
It could be implied that despite seeking to destroy Tenma's idealism by forcing Tenma to kill him, deep down he wanted to destroy the monster within himself for good.
He expresses a twisted sense of care and respect for a few people:
Cares for Nina in a very twisted fashion, as he allowed her to shoot him as a child, and it’s said he would have murdered Roberto if he tried to kill her and even saving her from the Neo-Nazis. Anna also reveals that he cried while looking through Bonaparta's sketches of the twins while reminiscing in the "Vampire's House" in Ruhenheim.
He claims to respect Tenma for saving his life, genuinely caring for him, and says he views him as a father figure, which is backed up by a neighbor he spent time with as a child, who tells Tenma that Johan was very grateful to him and often spoke highly of him. Dr. Reichwein also states in Another Monster that he believes Johan appreciated Tenma for being the one person who would never forget his existence. However, much like his relationship with Nina, this is also a minor prevention at best, considering he goes out of his way to break his idealism many times in the story.
After Karl revealed that he had lost his mother at a young age, Johan cried and held his hand, as he could relate to his experiences. While initially thought to be ambiguous whether he felt sincere empathy for him or if this was a ruse, the follow-up novel Another Monster revealed this to have been genuine. By Karl and Lotte's own statements in Another Monster, they were certain that Johan felt a personal bond with him due to connecting over their lack of a mother figure, and refused to kill him despite being able to do so and it being convenient for him because of his respect for him. It's worth noting, however, that this is partly only presented as a theory by Lotte, and it's possible Johan was indeed willing to let Karl die in the fire, despite genuinely empathizing with him.
Trivia[]
It is clear that the two Bible verses at the beginning of the series (Revelation 13:1 and 13:4) are likening Johan to the Beast. However, Urasawa takes this similarity a step further, albeit more subtly due to not including this verse at the start; this series-opening text skips over the highly relevant Revelation 13:3 - "One of its heads seemed to have received a death-blow, but its mortal wound had been healed. In amazement, the whole earth followed the beast."
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Near Pure Evils
