Let’s Talk About Hans

Hans is about every German person, predominantly male and in his 50s, who has a family and owns a house, usually through some inheritance, rich parents or in laws, or because he bought it at a time when you could literally get this shit for free on the real estate market before prices went up tenfold. I am thinking of boomers who just had to fart and money would be thrown at them. Those were the easy times.

Hans is the guy who pretends to be the man of the house. He knows how to barbecue, like every other person on Earth, as it is not rocket surgery. He rides his bike once a month and tells himself that he works out every day because of that. He optimizes the bike with expensive components so he can boast about how much lighter it is now, while his fat ass carries around 40 kilos of unnecessary body fat.

He doesn’t do any laundry, cooking or household chores around the house to help out his wife, yet he might go on camping trips with his buddy or take knife forging courses because, after all, he is a man and needs to be able to sustain himself and his family. Yet, once again, he doesn’t really help around the house, doesn’t know how to fry an egg and his wife picks out his socks for him every day before he goes to his office desk job.

He might do some clothes ironing once every 10 years. And when he does, he combines it with beer drinking, as well as telling all his colleagues about it the next day.

He is the type of guy who might have gone to the shooting range once or twice and then teaches all his, usually younger, colleagues about tactical shooting, explaining to them how keeping a slight bend in your knees while maintaining a forward lean provides a stable, shock absorbing foundation that improves recoil control and mobility while shooting.

In every team meeting, between the talk about what to do for a Christmas party and who is going to eat how many Weisswurst and Brezeln at next Monday's team lunch, he doesn’t shy away from mentioning how much he misses shooting an MP7.

All the while, I keep rolling my eyes, thinking that I don’t really miss the years I spent walking in the desert, blowing and shooting things up while in the military. But Hans wouldn’t know about that because yours truly doesn’t tell anyone about his background. Let Hans teach his younger pencil pushing colleagues about his tactical years on the airsoft range.

I know Hans wanted to be a Navy SEAL (not really) but couldn’t really make it into the military because he was too afraid to actually apply and give it a try. And we are talking about the German military, where pretty much everybody, regardless of their level of fitness or mental capacity, can join and get a weapon or broomstick. 

Anyhow, Hans doesn’t know about my past, that I hold two passports and that I am not willing to fight for Germany when the time comes. I would even go as far as to say that I don’t mind switching sides when the time comes and it suits me and my loved ones. Just like the Germans are currently doing to me. After all work is just work. It doesn't matter if you work for national security, military, a private company or whatever. It's all transactional. And a transaction can be rolled back, turned off or switched and the only loyalty is to your paycheque that helps you pay rent. Anybody who is loyal to a country or flag or employer is just an idiot. Why would you be loyal to someone who fucks you over? 

I mean, they are telling me who to date and who to love. If I choose wrong, I lose my job, not because they actually found anything wrong, but because they are unwilling to do their fucking job and properly complete a mandatory background check. Instead, they just mark it as inconclusive and make me pay the price for their incompetence. When they pull shit like refusing to accept an English birth certificate because it is not in German, their inability to finish the background check somehow becomes my problem. If they weren’t such dumbasses and actually did their jobs properly, there wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place.

They are talking about being more aggressive towards the enemy in a town hall meeting when, in that very same video meeting, people couldn’t join the conference because their servers could only handle a fraction of the working staff. Like, the video conference crashed after 200 out of 500 people tried to join. How can you say you want to become more resilient and aggressive when you can’t even set up a video conference? Apart from the fact that the service doesn’t have enough headsets for all its employees and will not have any available until next year.

Where am I going with this, and what does this have to do with the German Hans?

Well, at a time when German politicians and high ranking intelligence officers are saying we need to prepare for war with Russia, with some even saying that we are already at war with Russia, which we are not, it reflects the mentality of a lot of German fools.

Tell that to a soldier who is actually on the front lines in Ukraine. Tell that to a Russian or Ukrainian. Tell them that you, as a German sitting at a coffee shop in Berlin drinking your matcha latte, are currently fighting in a war, and they will be laughing at you, you silly little boy. Go ahead and tell them that, my son.

Because Hans, again, a person who doesn’t know how to do laundry, says we need to go fight and show aggressiveness towards another sovereign nation, while even gossiping about how many people will probably coward out and refuse to fight when the enemy is here.

Sure, Hans, almighty SEAL Team Six leader, tell us how you are going to fight and defeat the enemy.

You and your country cannot even supply headsets to your warriors so they can join a video conference that overwhelms the servers and drops out while you are trying to talk about how to become more resilient.

Tell me, Hans. Enlighten me. How should I, as a non German national, and Germans make that clear to me every day, fight and die protecting your inherited mansion and companies that were built on Holocaust blood, whose owners still profit from those dark, bloody days of their Nazi German ancestors?

I think the only rational thing for me to do here is take my foreign passport and skip town. If needed, even switch sides if it suits me.

And Hans, sonny, you would probably do the same.

Sure, you pretend to be the almighty warrior when you don’t even know how to fold a shirt, but hey, go ahead. Go and die in a ditch somewhere if you want. After all, you have wealth, assets and a family here. You should try to protect them.

But don’t demand that a stranger who hasn’t gotten any of this do the same just to make your family safe and protect your wealth.

Hans is every middle aged man in Germany who likes to pretend to be a warrior just because he goes on a camping trip with his €1,000 tacticool sleeping bag while paying for showers and WC facilities at the campsite.

Obviously, Hans knows his limitations.

He knows that he will skip town if he can. He knows that he is not going to fight. He knows he can’t, even if he wanted to. He knows that. He is not dumb.

He probably knows that the German military and all its intelligence agencies will leave him hanging if he ever finds himself on the front lines. He knows they don’t care about that, and he knows they don’t have the equipment, leadership and agility to handle a conflict.

But he pretends to believe everything is fine, efficient and that Germany can handle it when the time comes and shit hits the fan.

He pretends in order to suck up to the leadership around him. Or maybe he pretends so that he gets a head start on the running away part when shit hits the fan. Kinda like your “friend” who stands behind you and tells you to stay still when you guys are facing a hungry lion on your safari trip, all the while he is planning to run away. He was just telling you to stay still so he could get a head start.

Or maybe Hans truly believes that the German state is capable of fighting a war because he is naive and truly thinks Germany is as efficient as Germans, no non Germans though, say it is. That would truly be some room temperature IQ right there. Maybe he is just dumb and pretentious. I don’t really care. Let Hans be Hans.

I know there is no such thing as loyalty, and there shouldn’t be. Especially loyalty to a warmongering country and its corrupt politicians, racists and arrogant citizens.

Long story short, I don’t believe in loyalty for loyalty’s sake. When shit hits the fan, I am skipping town. I don’t have an inherited mansion to defend. I don’t have millions in family assets, a company passed down from Grandpa or a house my parents bought for the price of a fucking Volkswagen 30 years ago. I have no generational fortune sitting here waiting for me to heroically protect it.

People like Hans do. So Hans is welcome to stay.

If you inherited the house, the land, the business and the comfortable life this country provided your family, then by all means, grab your €1,000 sleeping bag, put those tactical shooting lessons to use and defend it. You actually have something here that belongs to you.

But don’t stand there surrounded by inherited wealth and lecture people who received none of it about sacrifice, patriotism and loyalty. And certainly don’t expect strangers to die so that your assets remain safe.

The same goes for politicians and high ranking officials demanding ever more aggression, military spending and confrontation. They can tell us that all of this is necessary for security, but when politicians have relationships with defence interests, lobbyists and industries that financially benefit from rearmament, I am going to scrutinize those incentives rather than automatically treating every call for escalation as some noble act of patriotism.

So when shit hits the fan, Hans can protect Hans’s inheritance. The politicians and their spoiled children can protect the corrupt system they built. The arms industry can protect its contracts.

Me? I’ll take my passport and skip town.

No wealth to protect. No inherited estate to defend. No loyalty owed simply because somebody else has decided that their interests should suddenly become my sacrifice.