On Twitter he writes umpteen satirical messages a day under the name El Hotzo and is quite successful with it. His tweets, in which he makes fun of capitalism, political parties or a supposed German Leitkultur, are seen by several hundred thousand people. He has 1.3 million followers on Instagram.
Now Sebastian Hotz, the 27-year-old’s real name, has written a novel. “Mindset” is basically a continuation of his Twitter account and collects a whole series of funny everyday observations.
This also works in the longer form. The jokes are framed by a story about a bunch of young men who try to optimize their lives and fall for a bizarre internet coaching.
Bicycle “the lowest link in the personal transport food chain”
At the center is Maximilian Krach, a young man who appears to be quite successful at first glance. He drives expensive cars, wears big watches and shares his knowledge in self-improvement courses, which he markets on Instagram. “GENESIS EGO” is the name of his brand, and behind it is the idea that the right “mindset” can help anyone to be successful. In this theory, successful people are wolves, other people are sheep (or “low performers”). And a bicycle, for example, “the lowest link in the personal transport food chain”.
One day, Krach’s posts are flushed into Mirko’s Instagram feed, who is extremely bored from his work in IT at a medium-sized company in Gütersloh. He gets infected by Krach’s ideas for self-improvement and immerses himself in the world of these young men, who all wear the same slim-fit suits and prefer to talk about racing cars.
But at some point disruptive factors enter their lives. At different points in the story, two women shake up the apparently well-optimized processes of the “GENESIS EGO” trailers.
In “Mindset”, the narrator happily dissects the often dreary everyday worlds of the protagonists. Many of the observations would probably also be successful as a tweet, such as this one about our working world: “Industrialization brought us a destroyed planet, complete alienation from our fellow human beings and a confusingly large selection of pudding flavors, but it didn’t save us a single minute of work.”
Novel against neoliberal meritocracy
Hotz can also draw on his own experience. He grew up in Franconia and now lives in Berlin. Before working as an author and, among other things, as a gag writer for the “ZDF Magazin Royale”, he completed a dual degree in Nuremberg. That consisted of business administration plus training as an industrial clerk at Siemens, as his publisher informs.
With “Mindset” he has managed to do more than just string punchlines together. He has written a novel that rails against self-optimization and a neoliberal meritocracy, while empathizing with its protagonists. No one is portrayed as a clumsy villain, which is good for the story. Sometimes the characters lack depth – but you still want to know how they continue.
