Professor Tarantoga saves human civilization! After using his chronopad to investigate the leading scientists and artists in history, Tarantoga concludes that without exception they are lazy drunkards. So naturally, he sends smart young people into various eras to invent differential calculus, to paint the Mona Lisa, etc.—all while a pair of police inspectors have their eye on him.

I’d bet my last złotych that Lem is carefully satirizing the rule of the Polish United Workers’s Party in this story of a fourth-millennium man who hails from Mars and has room in his brain for two or three different personalities (Kazimierz Nowak, Hipperkorn, and possibly a dreaded Nanów), the first of which leapt from a touring chronobus in the 20th century where he hoped to find the inventor of time travel, Professor Tarantoga.

Oh, tensor! Oh, turbulent perturbation! Some time before Professor Tarantoga invented a time machine and met a schizophrenic man from the fourth millennium, he apparently invented a transporter that took him and his new assistant Chybek to a series of progressively more advanced civilizations, the last of which included a barefaced cook who had an embarrasing accident in the cosmic kitchen, resulting in mankind (and indirectly resulting in time travel for the professor and Chybek).

We have no details on the German remake of Wyprawa profesora Tarantogi except that Lem adaptation was humorless.

According to Fernsehen der DDR, the German adaptation of Lem’s script finds the science-obsessed Professor Tarantoga with a strange guest who calls himself Novak (or maybe Hipperkorn) and claims to hail from fourth-millennium Mars where he quulles. part from the bit about quuelling, this certainly sounds like the 1963 Polish script that we read, but we don't know whether it was expanded or revised.