Dirk Roßmann has done and tried many crazy things in his life.

An action from 1990 is legendary, when he brought 20,000 copies of Der Spiegel to Leipzig and distributed them at a Monday demonstration.

He later became an investor who, in addition to his main business, the Rossmann drugstore chain, invested a lot of money in investments across a wide variety of industries and financial investments.

Now the 74-year-old entrepreneur with the high forehead and three-day beard has tried his hand at writing thrillers – with an idea that is said to have occurred to him last year when he slept badly for a while and was awake from four in the morning .

"The book was created in this world between dreaming and waking up - after 14 days I had the whole story in my head," he says.

Christian Muessgens

Business correspondent in Hamburg.

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Even his biography entitled "...then I climbed the tree!" was a success a few years ago.

For the thriller "The Ninth Arm of the Octopus" he has now worked again with the authors Olaf Köhne and Peter Käfferlein.

He also gathered a whole team of researchers around him, in the style of masters of the genre, who no longer act as lone fighters, but plan their next bestseller with military precision.

Most of the money for the campaign comes from his own assets, and Roßmann can also be seen on many talk shows and tirelessly gives interviews to boost sales in the Christmas season.

With success: more than 150,000 copies have already been sold.

Roßmann's book revolves around climate change and thus takes up a major social issue that is considered good manners in the drugstore industry.

The founding family of the rival dm around the patriarch Götz Werner also advocates philanthropic positions and has found its theme with the unconditional basic income.

In the early 1990s, Roßmann was one of the founders of the German Foundation for World Population and in the book he now envisions an earth in which the powers of Russia, China and America are forging a climate alliance.

Coincidence or not: Whenever the chef Ricardo, described as small and timid, shows up, who finally takes heart and saves the world, one thinks of Dirk Roßmann, who also always flirts with his slight stature and supposedly timid nature.

The scion of a family of merchants from Hanover built the drugstore group Rossmann, which – unlike its founder – does not spell itself with a sharp but with a double s, from scratch.

After training as a druggist in his parents' shop, he became self-employed at the age of 25 and opened his first store.

The fact that fixed prices for drugstore items fell at this point made it possible for him to develop a discount concept that attracted many customers and became the basis for expansion.

Today, the group, with its headquarters in Burgwedel near Hanover, has more than 56,000 employees and has a turnover of around 10 billion euros in over 4,000 branches in Germany and abroad.

Only dm is even bigger.

Success has made the founder a billionaire: his family's fortune is estimated at around 3.3 billion euros.