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Some time ago I read a book about a man who has to help hell to reverse the apocalypse.

Heaven started the apocalypse because the rate of people going to hell is growing by the years. Hell chooses the Protagonist and a devil (or was it called demon?) to travel through time and speak to great philosophers to find the meaning of life, which is needed to reverse the apocalypse. For the time-travelling part they had the cellphone of one of the archangels.

I can remember one scene in particular: At the beginning of the book (when the world still exists) the protagonist is happy because he just received his philosopher's degree. Someone steals his degree (the certificate) and while chasing this Person he runs into a church where he accidentally soaks himself with holy water just when the world ends. Last Judgement is passed onto the humans by machines (for budget reasons or something like that) and the protagonist can't be judged because in the last moment of existence he was soaked in holy water (which would bring him straight to heaven) and cursing (which would bring him straight to hell). It turns out that the Person who stole his degree is the devil/demon who he has to work with, but it dropped his degree to fetch an orange which, as the world was rolled up like a carpet, fell through a hole over Argentina.

Overall the book was a bit crazy. I'm pretty sure that the author is German.

I read the book about five years ago and it was not an old book, released the same year or the year before that.

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  • Any chance you can remember any more details? Such as what year you may have read it and how old the book was or seemed then?
    – Edlothiad
    Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 7:15
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    This plot interested me so much that for past two years I'm constantly checking if the book is translated to English.
    – Ege Bayrak
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 7:07

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I haven't read it, but apparently this is "Grendl" by German writer Frank Schweizer, published in 2007. The description on phantastik-couch.de (German) matches perfectly.

(English) Summary of the (German) summary:

After the end of the world (and after accidently blowing up the machine that judges souls due to a paradoxon), recently graduated philosophy student Max Merkur is approached by the devil to travel time and find out the meaning of life by talking to the great philosophers. This would reverse the apocalypse, which is something hell is quite keen on since they just launched their new online portal and do not want to have their work go to waste. On his quest Max Merkur is accompanied by the demon Lutherion and equipped with Saint Peter's stolen cell phone.

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  • The description seems to be in German...
    – Worse_Username
    Commented Oct 6, 2017 at 13:44
  • @Worse_Username, so it is (as it said in parentheses). I added an English overview.
    – Eike Pierstorff
    Commented Oct 7, 2017 at 7:42

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