Karl Glogauer

Karl Glogauer is the protagonist of two novels by Michael Moorcock, and a secondary character in additional novels and short stories. In Behold the Man, he acts as a surrogate Christ after travelling to 28 AD in a time machine. The novel Breakfast in the Ruins contains a somewhat different Glogauer, centering on a homosexual love affair between him and an unnamed man from Nigeria. The chapters of the novel are interspersed with detailed, though fiction, fantasies about Glogauer's past lives.

Some of the aspects of Glogauer's childhood as described in Behold the Man are based on Moorcock's own childhood, though he says "I had such a happy childhood I had a hard time finding material, especially for the novel version". Likewise, Glogauer's frequent headaches were also inspired by migraines that Moorcock suffered from, although these were later discovered to be caused by an adverse reaction to nicotine rather than any psychological causes as in Glogauer's case.

In Behold the Man, and at the start of Breakfast in the Ruins, Glogauer is white but by the end of Breakfast he has become black. (Similarly, Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius is white in The Final Programme but black in A Cure For Cancer.)