And here's the astounding part: Forty-two Swedes, ranging in age from 19 to 69, have changed their names (or added Klaus-Heidi to their existing first name) and entered the competition. The response was so overwhelming that Lufthansa had to shut the contest down a month early (the company was expecting only a handful of people, if any, to participate). Seventy percent of the contestants were men. Half lived in Stockholm and half elsewhere in the country; nine alone were from Sodermalm, a Stockholm neighborhood made famous by Stieg Larsson's novels.

On Saturday, at a bar in Stockholm serving German beer and currywurst, Lufthansa will announce the winner before all the Klaus-Heidis (the other 41 contestants will receive silver membership in the airline's frequent flyer program and 60,000 free miles). A separate contest doled out discounts to Facebook users who took the decidedly less cumbersome approach of changing the name on their account.

How did Lufthansa possibly conceive of this campaign? Engvall tells me that the idea (which at first also required participants to change their surname to Dorfmesser) was first presented to the company by the ad agency DDB, which pitched the concept with the storyboard below:

Engvall liked the idea because it was "simple and it's a bit absurd but in a positive way." And Lufthansa adopted it against the backdrop of an increasingly fierce price war among five airlines over the Stockholm-Berlin route, in an effort, Engvall says, to "talk about the dream of Berlin rather than the cheap Berlin"—to inspire people rather than inspire bargain-hunting. And it's a smart choice; the city has been attracting unemployed skilled workers from southern and eastern Europe for years now.

"What [the Klaus-Heidis] have in common is that they have an urge, or a dream, to make a change in their life," he says. "That is what Berlin is about. It's a very free city in many ways.... It's a little like what America was ... people go to Berlin to live out their largest dreams, or to start off again."

I asked Engvall how he would respond to the criticism that asking people to legally change their names—to modify such a fundamental part of their identities—has no place in a marketing campaign. After all, Lufthansa is dabbling in a bit of social engineering—creating an entirely new population of Swedish Klaus-Heidis. (The name "didn’t exist before," Engvall notes. "This is the world population of Klaus-Heidis now.")

"Whoever did it, it was totally their own choice," he says. "We're not forcing anyone, we're just showing an attractive prize."

I also asked Engvall, who is based in Stockholm, how he explained the unexpected rush of interest in the competition—what did it say, more broadly, about Swedes? "It shows openness to do something new and to discover other cultures," he says.