Ich bin zwei Öltanks

Ich bin zwei Öltanks is a roadside advertising slogan that the narrator’s brothers turn into a taunt and a trigger for his sudden attacks of rage. Its force comes not from the words alone, but from the private code built around them: a concrete oil tank on the way to the Ostsee becomes the point where the brothers’ mockery and the narrator’s sense of being alien take hold at once.

From Slogan to Private Code

The brothers’ repertoire of insults included calling the narrator a waterhead or H2O. They also claimed, when their parents could not hear, that he was not really their brother but a psychiatric patient left at the asylum gate to win their father’s pity. They located his supposed real home at Station G-Oben, among patients playing Mensch-ärgere-Dich-nicht. The narrator knew they meant to provoke him, yet some small part of him found the story plausible: at times, he genuinely felt profoundly foreign to his own family.

The taunt acquired its own signs. His brothers closed thumb and forefinger into a circle, like divers signaling before tipping backward from a boat, and devised a malicious three-note fanfare. A quiet hum or whistle of that tune could make the narrator lose control. The phrase about the oil tanks belonged to this same system of cues, in which a word, gesture, or sound could call up the brothers’ accusation without their having to repeat it openly.

The Roadside Encounter

On a drive toward the Ostsee, the family passed a huge, yellow-painted concrete oil tank bearing the slogan Ich bin zwei Öltanks. The narrator sat squeezed between his brothers in the back seat. His father drove along the country road in third gear, smoking Roth-Händle; as the tank drew nearer, even the hint of a glance toward it could precipitate the narrator’s rage. So could the hand sign given low between his brothers’ knees.

The tank’s absurdly emphatic advertisement thus becomes part of a family ritual of provocation. The brothers need not openly repeat their claim that the narrator belongs in a psychiatric ward: the approaching slogan, or the nearly hidden sign, is enough to reactivate it. The narrator describes the effect as an immediate loss of control, not as a considered response to the joke.

Rage and the Sense of Being an Outsider

The parents wondered about the attacks, which they described as breaking out of nowhere. The phrase helps show how that apparent suddenness coexists with a recognizable pattern: the brothers had established a repertoire of words, signs, and sounds that could provoke him, while the narrator’s lingering doubt about whether he truly belonged made their fiction sting beyond its obvious intent to tease.

As an expression, Ich bin zwei Öltanks is less a saying the narrator adopts than a landmark made unbearable by repetition and association. The public slogan is encountered on an ordinary family journey; in the brothers’ hands, it becomes a compact signal for an intimate cruelty. Its disproportionate effect captures the gap between what outsiders might see—a painted tank and a silly advertisement—and the private meaning the family has attached to it.