As the world started being disrupted with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020, engineer Elias Macke, based in his workshop in Leipzig, Germany, where he lives onboard his truck, decided to turn a period of social isolation and lost connections into the realisation of a long dreamt project: the construction from scratch of a functioning submarine.
With determination from the beginning, endless nights of mechanical and nautical studies and the spirit of a genius, Macke put together industrial scrap and spare parts, recycled and new materials into a completely self-projected and self-built submarine, that he called “Markus Heller”, in memory of a lost beloved one. Through restless months of construction, welding, assembling, research, and testing, in a self-built pool first and in a lake then, the “Markus Heller”, built uniquely for recreational and self-satisfactory reasons, is a wonder that makes the impossible possible, that brings megalomania into everyday life.