Ich bin dann mal weg

written on November 8, 2026, read July 2017

I don’t really like audiobooks. I read faster than the narrator speaks. And when I’m driving, I dislike that strange effect where you’ve covered 100 kilometres and somehow don’t quite know how you got there, because your attention was split between the car and the story being read to you. I hate that. Ever since I once walked around my car at a motorway service station to check whether I had picked up a dent somewhere after all, I’ve more or less given it up. I simply hadn’t picked up a thing from the drive.

There was one exception, and it is the entirely different reason why I don’t like audiobooks: on a holiday with my then-partner, Mr Kerkeling filled the car instead of conversation. She had brought along the SD card for the car stereo. It was a very strange trip. I really should have called the holiday off. The writing was on the wall. Impossible to miss, and poster-sized.

In that context, it was a little ironic, but perhaps also a little prophetic, that the audiobook was about a journey and about insight. More precisely, about his walk along the Camino de Santiago, which he described in “Ich bin dann mal weg” (published in English as “I’m Off Then”).

I prefer being on the road to arriving. But I have no religious grounding whatsoever, which is why the Camino doesn’t appeal to me at all. I do believe, though, that many of Kerkeling’s insights depended less on the route than on the travelling itself. You don’t necessarily have to follow a pilgrims’ trail; your own nose is really enough. In any case, you couldn’t give me a spiritual experience on a journey even by hooking me up to an incense ventilator – I’m simply too much in my own head about a lot of things.

But the rest? Breaking out of the hamster wheel, pushing your physical limits – that’s pretty much exactly what I experienced on my long bike rides. Cycling alone through the countryside in the morning. Emptying my head.

It’s the many small stories that make the book so interesting. For instance, he first had to explain to one of his travel companions that he was gay, because she suspected less than honourable intentions behind his friendliness. As a German, you know that, of course. But what Englishwoman has ever heard of Hape Kerkeling? Another passage made my respect for him grow considerably, long before his speech in the Thuringian state parliament: the episode with the dog. I won’t reveal what happened. Just this much: chapeau!

I haven’t watched the film that was made a few years later. I want to keep my own pictures in my head. Besides, I have a bit of a problem with German films.

I think the book is genuinely interesting even for people who don’t care for the rest of his work.¹ Even if you can’t bear to hear “Hurz!” – his famous parody of avant-garde music – one more time, and his stunt impersonating the Dutch queen was so long ago that it hardly seems real anymore: in this book, it’s Kerkeling the person who speaks, not the comedian (even if the latter keeps shining through).

After we got back, my then-partner and I spoke only once more. Briefly. Never again since. I haven’t listened to the audiobook again either. I now own a printed edition, though, which I dip into every now and then with great pleasure. It’s just audiobooks I no longer listen to.²