“Gendergaga’ is when you want to be addressed with your preferred pronouns, but it’s completely normal to force children to play with cars and guns because they have a penis.” – “The worst thing about self-care: that you I have to take care of it myself.” – “Why do we always only talk about energy companies and not about station bakeries when it comes to excess profits, nobody can tell me that a cheese roll costs 6 euros.”
You can’t ignore El Hotzo’s laconic, sarcastic tweets. Either you are one of the more than 500,000 Twitter and 1.2 million Instagram followers yourself, or you get your posts from others. El Hotzo, whose name is Sebastian Hotz outside the internet, has now published a novel with Kiepenheuer & Witsch. The 27-year-old, who among other things works as an author for Böhmermann’s “ZDF Magazin Royale” and runs a podcast with the TV presenter Salwa Houmsi, announced in an unusually sentimental manner that he had never been so proud of anything in his life as on this book.
The title is emblazoned in golden letters: “Mindset”. Behind that lies desolation. Desolate towns, desolate train stations, desolate conference rooms, desolate men, mostly in slim-fit suits. Hotz explains why he chose such a dreary setting for his debut novel as follows: “Places whose beauty only becomes apparent at second or even third glance simply come closer to me. A place like Gütersloh or Mülheim an der Ruhr is a bit like cooking with tofu: boring and dreary when raw, but if you look at it closely, its full potential unfolds.”
“Mindset” is about people who feel lost and unhappy in the sameness of their everyday life, which is determined by their full-time job, which together with the internet as a haven drives them into social isolation. A scenario that Hotz himself is no stranger to: before he became known as El Hotzo, he completed a dual degree at Siemens and took care of contracts relating to steam turbines. Not really an occupation that fulfilled him.
It’s about (rather ridiculous, of course) men
Above all, however, “Mindset” is about men. About men who, trying to camouflage their forlornness with big poses, can only be perceived as pitiful to despicable. The damage that patriarchy has done to its own profiteers is exercised against a certain understanding of masculinity: overconfidence supposedly leads directly to self-realization. I wolf, you sheep – and all these insecure men are actually only looking for the warming comfort of the herd.
In Hotz’ novel, two men are at the center of the plot: one who seems to have everything you could wish for – expensive cars and watches, many followers, success – and one who, with the help of the seminars of the successful, everything as quickly as possible also wants to achieve for themselves. Female characters appear only to mirror the ridiculous behavior of the males – in case the readership hasn’t figured it out themselves.
The man as the object of observation in Hotz’s work is nothing new: “Men invented Superbowl parties because they don’t dare to invite their friends over just like that.” – “Real men don’t cry unless they’re gendered in a text. ” – “When a man mansplains someone, it’s annoying, when two men mansplain each other, it’s a podcast.” – “Real men don’t talk about feelings, real men take it all in tacitly, so one day on the drive to the… Freaking out with the family at the slightest traffic jam and bringing the family to the brink of collapse and then pretending nothing had happened.”
But Hotz hardly felt any pressure to transfer his Twitter humor to the book: “In the end it was still funny. I wanted to create something that would have a different way of making people laugh and where the humor stems from the plot itself as opposed to punchline thunderstorms. I think if you find my tweets funny, you’ll find the book funny too. And if you think my tweets suck, you can give me another chance here.”