Press, media and publications
Sapere aude
Immanuel Kant
(english: „Have the courage to use your own mind“)
All publications and articles listed here are linked to the respective publisher, magazine, newspaper etc. for legal reasons. Authored and copyrighted by Detlev Henschel. If you are unable to find a particular article, we will be happy to help you or could possibly provide you with the article as a pdf.
Personal details
Henschel, who holds a doctorate in natural sciences, grew up in a tiny village on the north German coast, where the streets were still made of sand; – with plenty of farms in the neighborhood, meadows with orchids, lots of cows, forests with plenty of game and lots of fishing in streams and the sea – as well as the usual fist law for survival in the village. His normal everyday life could therefore be confidently compared to the new wave of today’s outdoor and survival existence, as there was no internet, Facebook, iPhone, WhatsApp or Netflix etc.
When Henschel attended secondary school in the next town, the discovery of Asian martial arts in the early seventies of the last century fundamentally changed his life, if only because series like Sesame Street or Dallas were not important to him … This fact alone branded him as an eccentric.
Back then, a good German had to attend Barras and do an apprenticeship before going to university. But after these less than edifying experiences, especially those in the banking industry, Henschel preferred to go into academia at various faculties in different countries in order to answer unanswered questions about nature, society and the martial arts, which had become his real life.
After several years in a managerial position (environmental industry), he lost interest in spending most of his day with people who held positions because they wanted them and not because they were qualified for them. This perception did not change during a visiting professorship and so he turned down further offers in this regard. His path was different, as he claimed.
It was not the theory, but the practice – the acid test – that appealed to him. Nothing is more fascinating than experiencing nature in nature: he called it ‚applied philosophy‘.
He embarked on a kayak expedition from Flensburg to the Arctic Circle (Book: Going solo on the Baltic Sea) to live exclusively from nature. There he wrote his first book on edible wild plants (Book: Edible wild plants. Mother nature’s delicacies), which immediately became a bestseller. Expeditions of thousands of kilometers in a kayak around Lake Baikal in Siberia (Book: Kayak adventure in Siberia) followed (‚Der Marathon-Mann‘, KANU-Magazin) or by bike across Europe (North Cape – Cape Vincente), tens of thousands of kilometers on hikes across North America (Los Angeles – Newfoundland; Book currently only available in German), polar Scandinavia, the Via Alpina (Slovenia – Nice) and in Japan (Kyushu – Hokkaido) as well as hundreds of thousands of kilometers in an off-roader through Africa (Book: Dinner with Lions) and Australia (Book currently only available in German).
He accepted an invitation to prove his knowledge as a coach for eleven years because the pain money corrupted him, as he stated, before concentrating entirely on writing and being outdoors.
He wrote his first article in 1982 after a 10,000 kilometer hitchhiking trip through the USA in search of Jack Kerouac’s America. Anyone who knows Jack Kerouac knows why Henschel had to follow this path. Henschel lives with his long-term partner, alternating between different countries – but always by the sea.
I wrote my first article in 1982 after a 10,000 km hitchhiking tour through the USA in search of Jack Kerouac’s America: Fernweh „Der Riss“ (Wanderlust „The Rift“. ).