Embrace the Johnny Däpp side of German culture with the Diplomat Aero Volute
No More In The House Please I’m Begging You No Really I’m Being Serious Stop
Ah, German design. What do you think of when you hear that? Something like these?
Sure! Sleek, functional, understated—all things that play perfectly into the image of German culture as basically, let’s say, Kraftwerk.
But of course, Germans are people, and people are capable of being More Than One Thing. And so while Bauhaus is certainly part of German culture, so is this:
(some swears later in the video if you are at work and also your coworkers understand German)
This is “Johnny Däpp,” which is a Ballermann song. Ballermann is a style of German music named after a notorious beach in Mallorca where Germans used to get excessively rowdy, enough that Mallorca had to be like “hey guys please stop.” And though Mallorca shut down the beach, the legend lives on in the work of party viking Lorenz Buffel, the guy who wrote “Johnny Däpp.”
A key element of Ballermann is a repetitive, simple chorus made of non-words. One of those non-words is “Däpp” (which I think translates to “duh”), the base of the chorus to “Johnny Däpp;” the song has nothing to do with the actor and the rest of the lyrics are about going to Mallorca to be dumb, which is another staple of Ballermann lyrics. The “Johnny” part is just a kind of fun riff on that, and it works!1
Ok, I know. At this point, you are thinking two things.
First, this sounds suspiciously like something I just discovered,2 went down an obsessive rabbit hole about, and then really needed to tell you guys because I have already sang the chorus to the Johnny Däpp song so much that it has joined “Friday” and “Yum Yum Breakfast Burrito” on my wife’s playlist titled No More In The House Please I’m Begging You No Really I’m Being Serious Stop.3 And: fair.
Second, and related, this extremely long setup for a “review” of a years-old limited edition fountain pen seems like it might be just an excuse to talk about this song I am no longer allowed to sing and/or I was running low on ideas. I understand why you might think that, but the truth is a little more complicated, which is to say: shut up.
Now that we’ve handled that: the Diplomat Aero Volute is the Ballermann side of German culture in pen form. Where the Lamy 2000 whispers “function and purpose” to you with its understated visuals, the Volute screams “NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NAAAAAAA” before losing its keys and calling all of its exes to see if they know where their keys are.4
The Volute is a special edition of the Diplomat Aero, a pen designed to look like a zeppelin probably. Like all Aeros, it has these distinctive scallops throughout the body of the pen.
These look cool, but they also serve a purpose: if you accidentally drop the pen nib-down, their aerodynamic qualities help it reach the ground even faster. I know this because No Reason.
The pen is all-metal and opens and closes with a “soft click.” By this I think they mean how it feels instead of how it sounds since it does feel soft but is actually decently loud, like a schnauzer.
The grip has a matte finish and this little ridge at the end, and the stepdown is smooth so it’s pretty comfortable to write with.
The nib is a silver-colored steel #6, branded with the Diplomat logo, unless you have mine in which case it is a black one you cannibalized from a Conklin because your original Diplomat nib, although a very nice writer, somehow got bent backwards at a 90-degree angle. No clue how that happened and it is totally unrelated to my knowledge of the pen’s terminal velocity.
But: that is all part of any Diplomat Aero, a pen that I think is worth your while in general. What makes the Volute special is its marble-dipped hydrosomething pattern.
How can I describe this to those of you using text-to-speech or a gentleman butler to read these posts to you? It looks like:
A zebra exploding
Beetlejuice sliding down a fireman’s pole while being recorded with a steadicam
Vertical adjustment bars on a TV from an alternate universe where everyone is on ketamine
The lost city-state of Shmohio
The subject of a YouTube penfluencer video entitled “we got ARRESTED for making this CURSED resin pattern? [DON’T WATCH AT 3 AM]”
The pattern on this thing is loud and mesmerizing, like me trying to do magic.5 In particular, after owning this pen for several years I remain invested in trying to determine if they dipped the cap and body separately, and if they were dipped at the same time trying to figure out how they’re “supposed” to line up.
I still do not know. Maybe you can figure it out? This pen was a limited (unnumbered) run of 1000 and you can amazingly still buy a new one here.
full disclosure I liked it better when I thought it was just a German EDM song about an American actor for no reason
specifically, I learned about this on Austrian TV, which I was watching when my hotel TV did not have any secondary audio programming AND there were no more episodes of NCIS or Castle that I could kinda understand in French. I know enough German that I could follow the all-reality Austrian TV channel that we had, and the guy who wrote “Johnny Däpp” was being featured on a reality show about German expats (he lives, as you might guess, in Mallorca)
this was the fastest addition to the playlist, clocking in at just about two hours from me hearing a two-second clip of it on TV to its lifetime ban from our household
the keys are in their other hand
welcome to part 1 of my new series on reclaiming Italian stereotypes; instead of saying we are “loud and talk with our hands,” you should say we are “good at magic”
Johnny's last name is actually colloquial German for idiot or fool even in the original spelling. That little language bit aside, the pen really looks like an exploding zebra (what a great way to describe it!). My condolences on the accidental test on the pen's aerodynamics, but I think the nib safe looks neat, so it might have been a win. The black nib on this particular FP just looks wonderful.