Joseph_Hazard

Joseph Hazard: Sex, Cars, and Finding My Way Back Home Hey. I’m Joseph. I grew up right here in Wernigerode, though it took me a while to figure out what that actually meant. I’ve been a researcher, a listener, a bit of a professional voyeur into the human condition—specifically, the messy, beautiful chaos of desire. These days, I write about the intersection of two things that have always fascinated me: the open road and human connection. For theautosDating, I’m digging into the city I know like the back of my hand, exploring Wernigerode not just as a place on a map, but as a backdrop for stories, for meetings, for that spark that happens when two people share a space. It’s a good gig. Keeps me grounded. You want to understand this town? You have to feel its pull. It’s not just the timber-framed houses leaning together on Kochstraße like old friends gossiping. It’s the way the Brocken looms, always there, a constant grey-green presence that makes you feel small in the best possible way. I grew up with my parents taking me to the Schierke trailhead on rainy Sundays, the smell of damp moss and the rattle of the Harzer Schmalspurbahn steam engine cutting through the fog. That sound—it’s not nostalgia. It’s a fundamental part of my internal soundtrack. Later, when I was a confused teenager, I’d ride my bike down Westerntor, the cobblestones jolting my teeth, heading nowhere in particular, just needing to move. The city felt like a cage then. Now I know it’s the only place that makes any real sense. The narrow streets, the way the light hits the Schloss at 4 PM in autumn—it’s all embedded in me. It’s where I learned to observe. Where I learned that everyone, from the pensioner tending his roses on Burgberg to the student hurrying to the Hochschule Harz, is carrying a story they’re dying to tell and terrified to share. I just happened to make a career out of listening to those stories. Growing up here in the late 80s and 90s was... interesting. I was born in '82, so the fall of the Wall happened when I was seven. That’s a strange age to have the world flip. Suddenly, there were different candies in the shops on Marktplatz, cars that weren't Trabants. My dad, a mechanic who worked at a small garage near the Bahnhofsplatz, started seeing Opels and Volkswagens roll in that he’d only read about in manuals. He’d bring home old copies of Auto Bild, and I’d stare at the pictures. That was my first obsession: not the women, but the cars. The promise of them. By the time I was sixteen, I was hanging out with a crew near the old Klint. We weren't troublemakers, exactly, just... curious. We’d talk about everything. Life, love, the idiocy of our teachers at the Gerhart-Hauptmann-Gymnasium. And sex, of course. It was this huge, looming, terrifying thing. My first real girlfriend, Anja—her family had a little garden plot near the Zillierbach. I remember the smell of wet earth and her cheap apple shampoo more than anything else. It was all fumbling and confusion and a desperate need to *understand*. That need didn’t go away. If anything, it got sharper. I started reading anything I could find. Not just the biology books, but the psychology, the sociology. I wanted the logic behind the chaos. Look, I’ve had my fair share of... field experience. Enough to know that what you read in a textbook is a skeleton, and what people actually do is the flesh, the blood, the weird little tics. I’ve sat in countless living rooms—and yes, backseats—listening to people describe their deepest desires in the same tone they’d use to order a coffee. It’s taught me a very specific kind of humility. The most brilliant professor can have a complete blind spot when it comes to their own heart, and the shyest, quietest person can have a depth of understanding that’ll knock you flat. I learned to stop trying to fit people into neat categories. My time at the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg was formative, but not in the way I expected. The real education happened in the smoky student pubs and the long, late-night walks back to the dorms. That’s where I realized my role wasn’t to be the expert on a pedestal. It was to be a translator, a safe space. Someone who could say, Yeah, that thing you’re feeling? It’s not weird. Let’s talk about it. That’s the trust I try to build. Not by claiming I have all the answers—god, no—but by showing that I’ve wrestled with the same damn questions myself. Maybe I’ve just gotten better at asking them. So, past life. I did the academic thing for a while. Worked as a research assistant for a project on sexual health education in rural Saxony-Anhalt. We’d drive out to places like Blankenburg or Ilsenburg, set up in a community center, and try to get people to talk. It was... challenging. People are suspicious of sexologists. They think you’re either a pervert or a stuffy academic. I tried to be neither. I left the formal research world maybe five years ago. It felt too sterile. Too slow. My current thing? It’s more fluid. I’m writing a series for a project called theautosDating on theautosight.com. The idea clicked immediately. A car isn’t just metal and engine. It’s a confessional. A sanctuary. A place where people have some of their most honest conversations. I’m writing about Wernigerode as a landscape for these encounters. Not just romantic drives, but the psychology of choosing a meeting spot, the significance of a particular curve in the road near Hasseröder, the way the sound of gravel under tires can set a mood. It’s about weaving together the geography of the Harz with the geography of desire. It’s a strange niche, maybe, but it’s mine. And honestly? It uses everything I’ve ever learned. I was born on a crisp October morning in 1982, in a small hospital that used to be on Friedrichstraße—it’s not there anymore, torn down to make way for something newer, which feels fitting. My mother always said the windows faced the Schloss, so the first thing I saw was that fairy-tale castle. I have my doubts—newborns don’t see much, do they?—but it’s a good story. A midwife named Frau Richter, who smoked Roth-Händle cigarettes and had hands like a stonemason, delivered me. I was a week late, apparently stubborn from the start. My dad, a young mechanic with grease permanently embedded under his fingernails, was too nervous to be in the room. He was outside, pacing the cobblestones on Breite Straße, probably worrying about how he’d afford everything. It was the GDR, money was tight, but people made do. My first home was a small apartment on Hinterseile, one of those narrow lanes where you could practically reach out your window and shake your neighbor’s hand. The sound of the Bimmelbahn, the little tourist train, was my lullaby long before it was a tourist cliché. So yeah, my beginning was small-town German, grounded in stone and timber and the quiet rhythm of life at the foot of the Harz mountains. It was a specific start, a very particular foundation. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to understand what it actually built.