Auf Kosten der Gesundheit Teil Zwei

Found the dead body of a BMW (not so sure about the model, kind of difficult to determine with certainty due to pyromania) last Monday noon while grocery shopping near Lohmühlenpark, the second most disappointing park of Hamburg just surpassed by the cash machine at the end of my street. This marvellously efficient work of German engineering had been burned to a crisp by someone who surely hated the guts of its proud upper-middle-class basic owner, probably due to various reasons, usually committing adultery with his wife. The four-wheeled vehicle's coachwork had melted and solidified, and ashes were covering the car of some monogamous gentleman parked on its right side. People passing by stared at it without the bewilderment I would have expected, maybe because it's a Central-European tradition and they're kind of used to it. I'll never know if the police photographer who took pictures of the corpse before me was Tom Petty or just a character in Guitar Hero 2. But its slow, merciless death looked like the most dramatic, thrilling thing I saw that day. One can never be thankful enough for the love and the insanity and the fire, specially all three combined.*


*This may or may not be the second issue of a series called Auf Kosten der Gesundheit, may or may not, depending on the rise or decrease of intentional homicide rate in Germany, Hamburg in particular.

All pictures taken on the 2nd May 2016 in the surroundings of Lohmühlenpark in Hamburg, Germany.

La foule

+ They claim [···] that they don't look for trouble. You know, they just try to live peaceful lives and be left alone. But, on the other hand, they go out and put themselves into situations, deliberately and constantly, that are either gonna humiliate somebody else or cause them to avoid humiliation by fighting. [···] This whole kind of alienated, violent subculture of people wandering around looking for, you know, either an opportunity or, if not an opportunity, then vengeance for not getting an opportunity. Then they get to be 30, and suddenly they wake up one morning and they realize, you know, there are no more chances. It's all gone. It makes them meaner, you know, and maybe they want to get back at the people who put them in this terrible, this dead end tunnel. 

- Now who are these people they want to get back at? 

+ Oh, they don't know. It's kind of "they", paranoid. You know, it's you, it's me, it's whoever might come too close to them on the highway in a car. It's somebody that makes a remark in a bar to them. They call them "the citizens", anybody who looks like respectable and looks like he isn't doomed, you know, like he has some kind of option, or money, or a home or all the things they don't have. 

- What do you see for us, for everything? 

+ Christ, it's bad. I mean, I'm not very optimistic. But I think one of the most important things is to recognize that we do have this mounting violence in us, and then to find the reasons. And once you find that, it's like curing a boil. And if people insist on saying "I'm a very gentle person and only these littlee bad gang of hoodlums over there is ugly and mean", then it's just putting off the recognition that the same venom that they [sic] are spewing around in public, a lot of people are just keeping bottled up in private. [···] Yeah, I learned a lot about myself just writing about them [sic]. I was seeing a very ugly side of myself a lot of times. I'm much more conscious of the kind of anger that lurks everywhere. But I don't do any, you know, I keep my mouth shut now. I've turned into a professional coward.*

Hunter S. Thompson to Studs Terkel, 1967, via Blank on Blank

* None of the things quoted above apply to Selim.

All pictures taken on 17th March 2016 at KNUST Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.