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Author Karim Khani: Breakneck narrative pace
Photo: Valerie Benner / Hanser Berlin
He has just given three tables a fresh, chestnut-brown coat of paint.
Now Behzad Karim Khani is standing with a garden hose in his hand on the sidewalk of Reichenbergerstrasse, a good 500 meters from Kottbusser Tor, and washing, as he puts it, the evening before from the street.
"Smells like Kreuzberg," he says, and puts a lawn sprinkler on the demarcated tree and bushes blocking the view of the street and health food store across the street.
Behzad Karim Khani is a writer and runs the Lugosi Bar in Berlin.
In his debut novel, he shaped parts of his own life and two decades of Berlin nightlife into a psychological gangster narrative.
"Hund Wolf Schakal" tells the story of the brothers Saam and Nima, who flee to Neukölln with their father from war and persecution in Iran in the mid-1980s.
The older one, Saam, becomes a thug and gangster while the younger one goes to high school and deals drugs.
Father Jamshid ekes out a passive existence and mourns the death of his wife in an Iranian torture prison.
In short sentences and with a sometimes breakneck narrative pace, the novel paints a picture of a gloomy Neukölln at the turn of the millennium.
It's a man's world ruled by absent bosses and the ghosts of the past.
Women are mothers, girlfriends, prostitutes - or dead. Saam and his friends are mere foot soldiers, balancing razor blades on their tongues with which to slash their enemies' faces.
Only Nima has contact with suburban houses, for which he ultimately only has contempt.
"I've lived in both Nima's world and Saam's," says Karim Khani, who likes to talk about the similarities between him and his novel characters.
He himself, born in 1977, came to Germany from Tehran with his parents and brother in 1986 – not to the capital, however, but to the Ruhr area.
He wrote poems as a child, and his father is also a writer.
But in Germany Karim Khani didn't start with his talent at first.
Persian poetry and prefabricated housing estates - they didn't go together for him.
He found a substitute for the lost poetry of his mother tongue in the English rhymes and stories of rap artists like Ice Cube or Nas, whose rhythm and staccato sentences still echo in his prose today.
At the time, Karim Khani felt as if he were living in two worlds: "I went to high school and had a criminal record." He tells how he dealt as a teenager and was caught with half a kilo of marijuana, how that got him a suspended sentence.
He still managed to go to school and even went to university.
After dropping out of art history and media studies in Bochum, Karim Khani moved to Berlin and stayed.
He quickly landed in the party scene of the early noughties and founded Bar 25 with friends, an open-air techno club on the banks of the Spree that existed until 2010.
Karim Khani has now been running his bar for eleven years – so long that during the afternoon meeting, hardly half an hour goes by without being spoken to, greeted, kissed or molested.
But that should soon be over, also because of the expiring lease in the increasingly expensive neighborhood.
“I've worked nights for 25 years now.
I've heard everything people can say to each other.
I'm done with it,” says Karim Khani, joking and serious at the same time.
In the years leading up to the novel, Karim Khani wrote screenplays and essays for newspapers in addition to running a bar.
When hip-hop god Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for his album »DAMN.« in 2018, Karim Khani saw it as an order from the very top to devote his full attention to his debut novel.
“Kendrick has the ability to talk about his brokenness.
He has this knowledge of who really owns the street: not the gang, not the gun, but the state, the police.« And indeed, Karim Khani's book sometimes sounds as if it were part of the narrated world of »Good Kid, MAAD City« , Lamar's early work, in which he describes his difficult growing up between gang wars and adolescent megalomania.
A large part of the book deals with the tragic life of Saam, the sensitive child of well-read parents, who collected insects as a boy in Iran and in his early twenties - after a jail fight in solitary confinement - again kept a fly as a pet.
She dies, like so much else in Karim Khani's unforgiving literary universe.
"I was Saam and I am Nima," he summarizes his own biography.
A while ago, Karim Khani says, he went into therapy and mapped his inner life by making a list of the different roles he saw as one.
Together with his therapist, he gave his former, violent self the name "Doberman Behzad" and tried to use its destructive potential positively.
“The Doberman Behzad is Saam.
He is someone who wants to change something and move forward with his means.«
Karim Khani recently read an excerpt from his novel at the 46th Days of German-Language Literature in Klagenfurt.
It was his first public reading, it wasn't enough for a prize.
“I had considered reading the text with a razor blade in my mouth” – an allusion to Rainald Goetz’s reading of the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1983, who cut his forehead with one and bled all over his body and text.
But Karim Khani remained good, remained the man in the baggy T-shirt with a shaved, intact skull, gold-rimmed glasses and gold watch that he is today - a writer, not a Doberman.
Karim Khani is already writing his next book and is toying with the idea of spending most of the year in Sicily, far from the dark, moody Berlin that drew him more than 25 years ago.
What was the attraction back then?
An acquaintance once gave him an apt description of the capital: "No one loves you, but everyone leaves you alone."
On the last page of the novel, Nima is stuck in a traffic jam at Kottbusser Tor in the early evening.
He wonders what would happen if all drivers just "got out and went home."
Maybe some of them would stroll over to the Lugosi Bar, where when it gets dark, candles burn on the brown tables and where Behzad Karim Khani still serves drinks.
Drinks for the people he's heard everything said to each other.
