Book with dedication, 1987
Author, adventurer, and emigrant: Henky Hentschel was born in 1940 in Ulm and began studying ethnology and sociology in Heidelberg in the 1960s. In his university town, he co-founded a self-managed facility for drug addicts. His experiences at larger media outlets, where he works as an author—including rejections of his unusual film ideas—prompt him to migrate: ‘Henky rebelled. He despised and disregarded societal conventions and shaped his life according to his strong desire for freedom,’ recalls Ulrich Hentschel, who takes care of his cousin’s estate. From his ‘exit,’ starting with his emigration to Elba in 1972, Henky Hentschel would no longer live in Germany, but instead in Guadalupe, Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba, where he also passed away in 2012. He processed many of his travel and life experiences through writing. For over ten years, the Mediterranean island of Elba was Henky Hentschel’s home. Initially, he made leather garments there, later running a farm and supplying local restaurants with his products. When his cousin Ulrich Hentschel visited him in 1981, he saw him only briefly: ‘He had to leave right away, to the mainland and then to Munich, to a woman. He was gone for two weeks.’ The handwritten dedication addressed to him in his book ‘Tutto pagato. Everything paid,’ which recounts three stories from his Italian residence, hints at Hentschel’s unconventional life path and its transience: ‘Until somewhere and sometime. Henky.’ Henky Hentschel wrote at or nearly every place he lived. Thus, alongside the accounts of his cousin Ulrich Hentschel, only his books provide access to his adventures and insight into his eventful, but poorly documented biography.
