I am hella political, and you can find my ideology and philosophy on the bottom-left-most corner of the political compass ;)

That means I like to help people and share! Yay left libertarian anarcho-
communism!

Some friends and I are doing a magazine for leftist and alternative events in Hamburg! It's called Rabbl (rabbl.mainstreamidea.com), and it's Hamburg's first English language online street magazine!

My other friends and I do a podcast called the Propaganda Podcast at the Moral Economy (www.me.mainstreamidea.com). We discuss current events with a philosophical twist, trying to put a new perspective on what we see in the mainstream media. Be warned! If you happen to be here while we are doing a scheduled podcast, we may ask you to join! (But you would be under no obligation to do so).

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

I have spent some good times hitch-hiking and couchsurfing. I would like to return the favour.

Listen, I don't usually respond to messages here because they just don't get to me. If you're really hard up for a place to stay then find me in Whatsapp. Please, this is my personal number which I am putting here in case you are really hard-up for a place to stay, so please only use it then. +49 1577 57 47 219

Interests

Philosophy, politics, economics, beerbrewing, drinking that beer.

• culture
• books
• acting
• beauty
• make up
• concerts
• education
• cooking
• wine
• cocktails
• running
• walking
• partying
• drinking
• clubbing
• gardening
• shopping
• politics
• investing
• fishing
• hiking
• boxing
• communications
• economics
• teaching
• law
• logic
• hitchhiking

Music, Movies, and Books

Prologue to my novel Gutenberg 2.0 (don't let it give you a bad impression of Hamburg -- I love this city)

Someone must have fallen in love with John G--, for one morning, without him having done anything worth mentioning, he received a present.
The night before, John was in St. Pauli with a group of acquaintances. More accurately he was in Park Fiction, near the Golden Pudel, one of his favourite places in all of Hamburg, not least due to its ready access to medium-quality light party drugs sold by Gambians under the protection of anarchists in the adjoining streets. There are, of course other good reasons to like Park Fiction, and the best, for John, was the people. Not that John particularly liked people. On good days people were a tolerable necessity, beings that hang around to occasionally fulfill some unavoidable utilitaristic function; on bad days they are neither tolerable nor necessary, and they fulfill no more utility than running into a cloud of gnats whiledd yawning. But the park, and Hamburg by extension, accommodated John’s delightfully bleak attitude towards his fellow human beings very nicely, since he could watch them as long as he wanted without engaging them, and yet, when he felt the apelike drive to interact, they opened up to him rather quickly, if he pressed the right buttons. That made Hamburg truly a perfect mirror for John, and such was the usual demeanor of a typical Hamburger, to give strangers the cold shoulder until said strangers broke the ice, which was why John loved Hamburg so much -- and St. Pauli and Park Fiction by subsumption.
The people of Hamburg, much like the city itself, were as cold as they were beautiful, and as unbearable as they were impressive. The cold and unbearable part was likely due to Hamburg’s wet climate and variable weather. Said weather, and the city and people itself, could well be summed up in one word alone: incomplete. Never was there a time at which a particular weather pattern in Hamburg wasn’t threatening to become something else entirely, like David Bowie, and that threat was always both oppressive and addictive, like David Bowie. Every sunny day threatened to rain; every rainy day threatened wind; every windy day threatened sun. The weather was like three people playing rock-paper-scissors, each constantly choosing both the winning and losing hand. The weather just couldn’t make up its mind, and Hamburg’s climate took its frustrated indecision out on the inhabitants. The sun was the greatest threat, for it would lure the Hamburgers out of their dark, dank apartments and loud offices to sit outside, take a stroll, or even eat ice cream in the dead of winter, and all of the sudden it would rain and wind all over the place, and they would get very cold and very wet, and then complain about it, as if quite so bad a thing has never happened to anyone at all before. Throughout the year Hamburg’s humidity remained at a constant one hundred and one percent, and the question whether and when it was going to rain was statistically correlative to whether or not you had forgotten your umbrella, which for half of the year was utterly and irrevocably useless, since it was either too windy and the rain mobbed you from all sides, or the tiny rain droplets hung about in the air, waiting like cobwebs for you to walk into them, or like tiny slobbering fairies looking for a kiss. On some milder days you had the false impression that you were walking through the mists of an ancient, secluded mountain monastery, when in reality you were in the flattest, unholiest city on earth, grudgingly trudging from point A to point B, with foul thoughts to match the dismal ambience. Even if there were no rain and the sun was out, there would be wind, and a perfectly reasonable activity like taking a stroll in the city park, aptly named Stadtpark, became a comical nightmare that would depress any mime in a fifty metre radius. Overall the climate prevented you from any sort of comfort, as you always had to wear a jacket but also always had to take your jacket off, except for those two weeks in summer and two weeks in winter, when the climate in Hamburg briefly acquiesced that, yes, it had been acting silly, and took a break just long enough for you to delude yourself into thinking that everything is alright. In the summer the temperature would sometimes reach thirty, and the most objectively amazing thing anyone could do was take the afternoon on Friday off to sit in the Stadtpark, grill sausages, and occasionally take a dip in the pond, all the while surrounded by white, pasty, charmingly half-naked bodies. In the winter the temperature rarely dipped below zero, yet, due to the humidity, the cold was omnipresent and penetrating, and if, like ninety percent of the city’s inhabitants, you had the misfortune to live in a north-facing apartment, you would have found yourself sympathizing very much with the Night’s Watch, and your progressively darkening wardrobe and affinity towards crows reflected this fact. Black, of course, was the most sensible colour to wear in Hamburg, for it absorbed those fleeting rays of sunshine that bled through the mist; if it were allowed, the Hamburgers would likely adopt Dire Wolves, if only to keep their apartments warm, as a safe alternative to nuclear energy (thankfully they are not, a relief to all of those sensible beings who understand how horrid dog people are). “Winter is coming”, no Hamburger had ever said earnestly, for winter, real winter, was always at the door, but never had the decency to come in, except exactly at that moment when it was least expected. And yet, in those two weeks in the summer and two weeks in winter, and maybe once every few days, when the weather forgot to cast its misery and gloom upon the populace, the city opened up and became the most beautiful in the world, a majestic mix of broad avenues, tall trees, old and new buildings, canals, bridges, moss and water. And this beauty was striking, for it left an impression on you that you could not shake, no matter how hard you tried. Once in Hamburg, you heard Hamburgers say, you could never leave, or if you left, you had to return, and wherever you were in the meantime you carried the city with you in your heart and in your lungs.
As the weather so the city, and Hamburg was always incomplete. That was the inevitable outcome of the richest city in Germany, where there were always enough people to find something worth complaining about, and they always seemed to have enough money to lobby the city to pay to change it, unless it happened to have to do with education. As soon as any building became old enough to develop its own charm, the city would tear it down and replace it with a glass box containing one Edeka supermarket, one Budnikowski drugstore, one Schanzenbäckeri bakery, one Block Haus steakhouse, one Jim Block hambuger joint, and one token “Mom-and-Pop”, take-your-pick beauty salon or rock ‘n’ roll bar franchise. This was, of course, a big improvement over the buildings from the 1960s and 70s, when it was apparently in vogue to destroy ancient, holy edifices that had survived the Great Fire and the Second Great War, only to replace them with yellow-bricked Frankensteinian monstrosities that everyone, without exception or exaggeration, hated more than the Nazis. Not that anyone liked the new buildings either; Hafen City, the biggest construction project in Europe at the time, flattened charming, old brick warehouses in order to make room for blank, white, sterile office buildings and a live-in playground for equally blank, white and sterile people. They themselves, of course, lived somewhere else entirely, because only the truly deluded, eccentric (and rich) among Hamburg’s Hamburgers would choose an apartment in Hafen City, each of which looked as if the architects, having guzzled their upfront on an a six-month, death-driving binge, frantically assembled their models out of the brick and tiling samples from the local hardware superstore. Then there is the new Philharmonica, which jutted out awkwardly at the edge of the Hafen, and exemplified the exact attitude Hamburg’s rich had towards their city. Built to be a beacon for classical concerts and other high-class cultural pursuits (no one really knew), the structure presented itself as nothing short of a colossal failure from day one, as it bended itself to the mindset of those who built it. The mirrored glass walls that thrust themselves out of its concrete slab Fundament were made up of bulging, rounded, rectangular windows that made it look as if the main architectural features of the building had been cut out of a comic book. Its roof, originally designed to express waves at high sea, became a series of concave triangular spikes, because someone somewhere wanted to fit more office space underneath them. In the end the building resembled what would happen if you glued a bunch of blue ice cubes together and carved the resulting block in the style of Bart Simpson’s hair. And yet the Philharmonica, as misplaced and misshapen as it was, had its beauty and charm, if you were lucky enough to take the ferry down the Elbe just before sunset, and the red, pink and purple light of the falling daystar reflected from its blue surface, and the entire mass became a mirage of a great ship lost in a grey city. But this beauty was only available to those few who had will to find it, and most of the inhabitants of Hamburg would never enjoy their new Philharmonica, because, overpriced from the very beginning, it was never completed. Hafen City and the Philharmonica were, of course, only a small, non-representative part of Hamburg, and yet exactly for that reason they were highly representative. For Hamburg was made up of a collection of very distinct neighborhoods, from the vibrant shopping paradise of Mönkebergstraße to the haphazard and dreadful Wandsbek to the quiet yet communal Winterhude to the quiet and non-communal Harvesterhude to the old and Jewish Altona to the open and luxurious Jungfernstieg to the wholesome and secluded Großneumarkt to the rich and conceited Ottensen to the warm and flavourful Portuguese Quarter to the shicky micky Eppendorf to the half-and-half St. Georg to the spirited and turbulent Schanze to the diverse and distant Wilhelmsburg to the afterthought of Harburg to the friendly and familial Hoheluft to the shining black pearl of Hamburg: St. Pauli. St. Pauli contained the entire city condensed into a singular form, from the grand habour to the Anarchist cooperative to the elusive fish market to the alluring Reeperbahn – I need not go on – with the proud addition of bars and prostitutes.
Prostitutes, of course, are a convenient segue to the people of Hamburg, and, just as the weather and the city, so are the people incomplete. John of course was no stranger to his name, and from time-to-time he enjoyed the visage of St. Pauli in its sinnliche form, specifically for the people he found there. But there are other visages of Hamburg in people form, and to put it bluntly, none of them are good, and each Viertel of Hamburg seems to have its own unique representation of that ungood, if one is willing to generalize. In St. Pauli it was not the prostitutes who stalk the night who represent that ungood, nor the drunkards nor club owners, but the people who, three times a year for one month at a stretch, visited that most depressing and grotesque orgie of consumerism and unashamed inauthenticity that tri-annually blemished St. Pauli like a particularly aggressive form of herpes: families with small children enjoying the Hamburger Dom. This is not to stigmatize those who have herpes; it should be well understood that the disease is, for the most part, completely benign, and, like the Dom was, herpes is a visual sign that, hey, at least someone is having fun. But also like herpes, the Dom seemed to be a recurring phenomenon without which people could have gotten along rather nicely, since, if fun is the goal, then it is best to have fun directly and unabashedly, without worrying about whether people know about it or not, and especially without the carnevalesque misrepresentation of the meaning of fun that feels like a parable that never quite gets to the point. To reiterate, the Dom was not alone the blemish, but the fact of children and families going to the Dom, for it proved that a vast swath of people would rather subject themselves to a few fleeting hours of money and brain cell loss than accept the screaming, mewling mistakes they have made in life and teach their children self-reliance and self-occupation. If the Dom had originally stood there to become a ruin, for the Hamburgers to solemnly watch as it decays over the decades, like a large artistic installation, a franchised sister to Banksy’s Dismal Land, then the Dom might be said to have served a purpose, and the people who went to enjoy it would later be known as die Aufgeklärten, the Enlightened Ones. Instead what you got was a bright cocoon for the rapid pupation of a very special Hamburger variation of the German Child-King. This was a creature who grew up feeling entitled, who very wrongly associated love with winning something, and who had so desensitized themself to external stimuli that for them to know the feeling of warmth at all you quite literally had to start a fire under their feet-- preferably with a molotov cocktail. These are in fact that percentage of the Hamburger population that got it in their head to become lawyers, because what better, more German way to convey your lack of empathy for everyone and everything than by learning countless volumes of precisely vague legalese and disguising your leaching of society as the rule of law? To generalize in this way, is, of course, an injustice, but it is suffice to say that the Hamburger law students who do indeed become human beings will emphatically say, “Yes, they are like that.” And in any case all of this is not to pick on the lawyers or children or even the Hamburgers, but to provide a telling example of what even a great city such as Hamburg can produce if it doesn’t pay attention and allows the wealthy have their way for too long. And before I go any further, if you have a lot of money and you do not invest it in helping others with absolutely no expectations or even hope of receiving something in return, then you are not a good person, no matter how many times the bottles of wine you drink yourself to sleep with tell you otherwise.
Lawyers are not bad; they have always been a symptom of the blight that is the rich, created and maintained as a class of beings for the sole purpose of enshrining the wealth and power of a few lucky individuals into the binding rule of the Word. And Hamburg was the city of the rich, which is ultimately why it and its people can only be described as incomplete. No house, no social project was safe, so long as it did not turn money for those who already had too much of it. Even St. Pauli only retained its alternative visage in order to maximize profit, so that alternative culture embraced the ever-changing city around them and grew inwards, to create a neighbourhood where you can buy happiness anytime you want, but it will only last until the sun rises. And then there was Park Fiction, at the edge of St. Pauli, where any person would open up to John at a moment’s notice, if he felt so inclined to make that leap of faith in conversation. If you are, like John, that special type of narcissist who genuinely loathes talking to strangers without it being on your own terms, then Park Fiction was your kind of park. This was the park that won John’s heart, for John, it must be understood, had the heart of a social misanthrope. It was where he could easily get lost in gaiting fantasies without facing the grim possibility that, at least for some of those individuals, these fantasies might in fact have been true. For someone as in tune with reality as John thought he was, Park Fiction provided the idyllic backdrop to a city that was all about one grueling and rather distant truth, the secret to its wealth: the harbour. In this way, except for the harbour part, Park Fiction was much like Marie Antoinette’s garden estate for the noncommittal. The park, which was no park at all -- and this should tell you enough already -- but more of a lop-sided square perched above Hamburg’s second most famous street -- St. Pauli Hafenstraße, Reeperbahn being the first -- afforded an amazing view of the harbour for the common person without throwing that harbour in the person’s face. Who would want to hang out in a park that reminded one of the ultimate reason everyone was in that city in the first place? That is actually the most park-like part of the park: that it is an escape. At Park Fiction you could make up your own reasons, or just forget reason altogether, and give yourself over to the, sights, sounds, tastes and smells of the city of Hamburg and its people without a second thought as to where they came and where they were going. And nonetheless, the location was not for the decadent with weak nerves or heightened sympathies. John often saw experienced drunkards bellowing at each other, and endangering other parkers to their violent boorishness. He had seen more than one pregnant hobo woman squat behind the bushes and then rummage through the trash cans for wiping material. It was just for this reason -- the special characteristics of people of such a park -- that John had always found a special clarity whenever he went there, a clarity which few other places in Hamburg afforded. By watching these people he had the feeling that he had chosen the right life -- or even that the right life had chosen him, as narcissistic logic also goes. He didn’t have the feeling that he is somehow better than these people, but rather that he and perhaps only he could make their lives better, for the very reason that he chose to observe them in their own world. Only he could see how they actually were. He knew, just by looking at them, that he couldn’t save them all, but observation and passive percipience were enough to serve these higher purposes, so long as no one else got involved. And so it is with John: A story about a city, its weather and its people ended up really being about him.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Pizza.

What I Can Share with Hosts

I'm a pretty mean cook.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, Croatia, France, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland

Countries I’ve Lived In

Canada, Germany, United States