Cherrypicker
Hypnosis and other crackpot ideas

Sven Regener and Andreas Dorau have written a second book about the life of the one-time New German Wave star. It demonstrates that it’s not just success that’s fun.

By Holger Moos

In 2015, Andreas Dorau, writer and front man of the band Element of Crime, together with co-author Sven Regener, wrote a book together about himself, the “inventor of the subversive electro pop schlager“. It’s called Ärger mit der Unsterblichkeit (Trouble with Immortality). While Dorau is still not immortal, the pair have now written another book about Dorau’s life, Die Frau mit dem Arm (The Woman with the Arm).

Set in the world of the German music and culture business, it is another magic moment of trivia, packed with episodes about failure and futility and drenched in (self-) irony.

I had money, they had fun

The book starts at the beginning of the new millennium. For the musician, born in 1964, it does not get off to a good start: “I was out of the game, yesterday’s man, there were lots of young people pushing their way up, I had money, they had fun, … I had a past, they had a future.“ Dorau had given up his job with a record company and with it his desk and phone. He was now “a freelancer at all levels – artist, video consultant and telephonist“.

There is no comfort in the music business: “Musical work back then, if you want to call it that, was uninspired muddling through. You randomly layered samples and tracks with no particular purpose, and the often-mediocre result sounded OK after a drink or two.“ After this start to the new millennium, things could only get better. They did, too, at least some things did.

Dorau did lots of what you would now call projects. But unlike current project jargon, which tends to present the contents with deadly earnestness and great urgency, Dorau’s projects are based on coincidences, activism, crackpot ideas, financial problems, and losses. The death of his mother in 2007, for example, was followed, after some turbulence, by the release of the album Todesmelodien (Death Melodies).

In the course of planning a documentary of Dorau‘s life, a passing mention is given to Werner Herzog‘s film Herz aus Glas (Heart of Glass), during the filming of which, allegedly, all the actors were under hypnosis. Dorau thereupon wants to be hypnotised too, in order to finally discover the truth about his youth hit Fred vom Jupiter (Fred from Jupiter, 1981). He and a few friends go to Hamburg‘s “king of hypnosis“. But unlike his assistant, who immediately falls into a trance, it does not work for Dorau, even though the hypnotist pulls out all the stops. So as not to disappoint the others, he pretends to be hypnotised and mumbles incomprehensible things, but “what I really think of Fred vom Jupiter I probably will never know.”

The culture business is like a lottery

The book’s title alludes to Dorau’s fear of illness and death. But he is no hypochondriac and is relieved rather than disappointed when the doctor gives him the all-clear and sends him home: “I’ve escaped death by a whisker again … now I’ll go and treat myself to something from the Euroshop a couple of doors down from the surgery!“ One day, after suffering severe bouts of dizziness, he goes for a proper check-up. At last, he is allowed to go “in the tube“. A woman is supposed to give him a signal with her arm to let him know when the contrast agent is going to be administered. He waits a long time, but not in vain. And once again, he is lucky. The findings are unremarkable, but he is told he has an above-average-sized brain, which pleases him: “I owned something great, … an aristocratic palace of a brain where the rooms may not all be heated, but it was big and it was mine“.

Plentiful anecdotes relate to his sometimes more, sometimes less successful albums with titles like Ich bin der eine von uns beiden, (I am One of the Two of Us) Aus der Bibliothèque, (From the Library) Das Wesentliche (The Main Thing) or König der Möwen (Seagull King). Unplanned hits, such as Ossi mit Schwan (Ossi with Swan) are created by taking a single from the album Die Liebe und der Ärger der Anderen (Love and the Others’ Trouble, 2017). The song’s content is based on a true incident that took place in 2008, when two drunk Bavarians verbally abused an East German tourist by the River Isar in Munich and then hit him with a living swan. Three years after the album’s release, one of the Bavarian yobs appeared on the television dating show Der Bachelor, and this earlier story was made public. Ossi mit Schwan (Ossi with Swan) re-emerged, becoming a minor online music video hit. Which just goes to show “that in terms of its paths to success, the culture business is no less haphazard than the North-West German Lottery“.

As relaxing as the telly

The Goethe-Institut in Moscow gets a mention in one of the episodes in the book, where Dorau performs with his band. Things take an unexpected turn in the run-up to the concert, and they end up performing to an audience of “very old people“ – a concert that is acoustically convincing mainly due to the protection against interception.

Regener’s brash tone and the humour that goes along with it give Die Frau mit dem Arm a very endearing quality. Reading it is wonderfully conducive to relaxation. For his part, Dorau relaxes the old-fashioned way in front of the TV, which he prefers to contemporary streaming. Only when you watch TV are you free and not straitjacketed by other peoples‘ expectations: “Everyone recommends you watch some streaming series, but no-one recommends a particular TV programme anymore … But there’s nothing better.“