Book / memoir

Der Tschechen Jahn

Nighttime Berlin street with wet pavement and a parked vintage car, atmospherically lit — Atmospheric image: night street in Berlin. Photo: Darius Krause / Pexels (free license). Source

Berlin, late seventies and eighties. A son tells the story of his father: born Honsa Naplava in Prague, escaped under the name Jan Eichler, stranded in West Berlin instead of New York. A discotheque on the Ku’damm becomes a business; the business becomes cocaine — shuttling between America and Berlin.

Daniel grows up inside it. Four years old, two years in the USA, without his mother being told. Later the UFA factory, the street, the city’s names. Family memory and public record stay clearly apart. No kitsch, no speculation — just the hard line of a childhood beside the man some called the Czech Jahn.

True crime and memoir in one: the Berlin underworld of the eighties, seen at a child’s eye level.

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