Hans-Christian Dany – As a sheikh at carnival

It used to be said: If you don’t succeed, you’ll become the boss. The author Hans-Christian Dany, who grew up and lives in Hamburg, became one and wrote it down. So that you can understand this better, it’s first about another boss, it’s his father. He went bankrupt with his large construction company as a result of the “oil price shock” in 1973 and mismanagement and the good old life in exuberance as if there was no tomorrow – in short: the illusion of an ideal world.

Dany has published a series of essayistic books about bomber jackets, amphetamine and the boorish mechanisms of the control society in Edition Nautilus. “Guilt was my hobby – balance sheet of a family” has now been published by the publisher. In general terms, it’s about guilt and debt and how they might fit together. This “pamphlet” is a commissioned work. A gallery owner in Düsseldorf commissioned Dany to write twelve texts for 500 euros each to publish online; the topic and scope were irrelevant.

The result is a patchwork of autobiographical reflections, which are initially presented predominantly chronologically, later in a bursty manner, peppered with all kinds of anecdotes. How much fiction and/or fibbing play a role in this is difficult to say; a bit of guerrilla fun may have crept in.

Dany takes us on a journey through the old post-economic miracle Federal Republic of Germany. Anyone born in 1966 like him (for example me) will find the facts and historical data that serve as a guiding thread interesting. The fact that Dany almost hypes the 1966s as a “generation” is not only daring, but nonsense (even if it is of course a very select vintage). I remember how “car-free Sundays” were introduced for a short time in 1973 after the “oil price shock”. In our house, the sweater was declared a cult. My father checked every day to ensure that the temperature in the children’s room did not exceed 18 degrees. Dany’s father was allegedly threatened by the Baader-Meinhof gang. Things were quieter for us there. However, dissatisfaction arose when I regularly confused the words “tourist” and “terrorist” (just like “church” and “cherry”). Dany’s grandma smoked 80 cigarettes a day, and so did my grandpa, who came from a completely different background. When Dany’s grandparents lived in the “Four Seasons,” there was a Lady Gun from Cartier in her grandma’s handbag: “The single-shot pistol went perfectly with the little silver bowls in which you clean your fingers after the oysters.”

Dany comes from a civil engineering dynasty (more than 1,500 employees). When the “oil crisis” happened, he went to the carnival as a sheikh. I dressed up as a hippie, so you didn’t have to do much. I didn’t have long hair and I had worn-out clothes. We celebrated in the bathtub, social housing, with the neighborhood children, but without water, it was too expensive. Dany learned how to fillet frog legs and eat oysters, my father dragged pallets of turtle soup (still legal back then) from Aldi. It was too bitter for me. No, 1966 was not a generation. I never felt like Napoleon either. According to Dany, in 1975 that meant being a “problem child.”

Money brings money, another old saying. At the age of 10, Dany learned how to keep books and sold ammunition boxes as “furniture” at school. He played soccer in the “cemetery for industrial sludge,” and we played soccer in the garbage dump up by the beet field, mainly because it was forbidden. Dany was fascinated by Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ borderline bassist with a swastika T-shirt: “Sid, who presented himself as a possible Nazi, seemed honest while the teachers lied.” Kind of like today. Is life that easy? Dany’s thesis is: »Saying no and becoming nothing once seemed like an option. (…) Over the years, saying no became more complicated.«

For him, the “Third Reich” and the 80s jump back and forth. But Brokdorf, Wackersdorf, urban warfare? Doesn’t exist. Imagine a tennis match in Flushing Meadows: left-right, right-left. At that time in northern Germany, where I also lived, people could hear everywhere: “Occupiers out!” The bands that sang this soon mostly had no hair left. Dany, meanwhile, was still half-bustling with the Mao Bible that he had found in the attic of his building lion producer. He understands less and less and is no longer understood. His parents threaten to send him to boarding school in beautiful Salem in Swabia. But it’s too expensive. Then Uwe Barschel, his godfather’s employer, dies. For me back in 1987, the death of Franz-Josef Strauss was more decisive for the war, because the West Left lost their enemy image, which is why they completely missed the turnaround/annexation of the GDR/reunification.

We learn from Dany that he lacked the ambition even for drug dealing. He trivializes the parents’ callousness by saying that they were children of war. Dany also repeatedly sprinkles the disintegration of his family into his cocktail of anecdotes. His brother committed suicide in 2021 after a long phobia, which, like the company’s bankruptcy, was perceived by his family as a form of “loss of honor.” The father had died three years earlier. Is this a moral image of life in a malady post-war country? No, it is a broken family, one of many that has fallen for the cheap money – voluntarily.

Then the “vain nerd” Rainald Goetz appears (and disappears again). Conjectures about neoliberalism are offered, Thatcher and Kohl sing dirty songs. Dany writes that Hermann Göring and Roland Freisler were guests too often at Dany’s great-great-aunt’s holiday guesthouse on Sylt. He comes out as a cheap money enthusiast and a Christian Kracht admirer. He particularly likes the traveler in Kracht’s decadence novel “Faserland” (1995) when he says: “Shut up, you SPD Nazi!” He could have heard that live with me when I was 15, without the Axel Springer background from Kracht’s family. Remember: You can’t own decadence, you are part of it.

But then… night falls for Hans-Christian Dany. The norm-defier and renegade of the wealthy guild voluntarily takes over his father’s business, which is worth millions in debt, crosses the line from the everything-denying twilight creature to the voluntary entrepreneur and has finally arrived in capitalism. As a “minus millionaire” and “breakfast director,” he is courted everywhere. In the end, his story isn’t complete, but there’s time for green oysters in front of truffled partridges, along with a 50 euro tip. Now the snob no longer feels guilty, just overwhelmed. The attempt to get everything done in the casino fails. »At some point the whole apartment would be overflowing with money. I got claustrophobic and thought the notes had to go.” But without debt, Dany has become worthless to the German financial industry. A dream.

There is even something else that connects us as people from 1966: “Even though I had received the last installment of the fee, I continued to write as if nothing had happened. I did it like I smoke, occasionally tipping out the ashtray.”

Hans-Christian Dany: My hobby was to blame – the balance sheet of a family. Edition Nautilus, 128 pages, br., 18 €.