In Empire, Kracht tells us the true story of August Engelhardt, a remarkable and noteworthy outsider who, trained as an apothecary's assistant and influenced by the Lebensreformbewegung movement, suddenly took off at the beginning of the 20th century and went to the Pacific German colonies. There, in the so-called protectorate lands of German New Guinea, he founded the Solar Order: a quasi-religious community that aims to realize the ideals of nudism and vegetarianism on a new basis - no longer limiting itself to petty-bourgeois conventions. Engelhardt acquires a coconut plantation on the island of Kabakon and devotes himself entirely to - without caring about economic success or at least minimal profit - the theoretical development and practical implementation of the doctrine of cocophagy. The “sun man-cocophage”, free from worries about clothing, housing and food, focuses exclusively on the fruit of the coconut palm, which ripens closer to the sun, than all other fruits, and ultimately can lead a person who feeds only on it (and therefore on sunlight) to a state of immortality, that is, to make him godlike.