Hans Amsel
OOC
| Game | Journal | Portrayed By |
|---|---|---|
| Operation: Oddjob | in_good_hans | Bill Nighy |
Basic Stats
Full Name: Hans Dietrich Amsel
Nickname(s): Seriously, try to shorten "Hans" and not sound like an idiot. He does, however, answer to both "Doc" and "Herr Head-Shrinker." He'll even respond to a "Hey, you!" directed at him.
Gender: Male
Age: 61
Date of Birth: December 6, 1949
Zodiac: Sagittarius
Sexuality: Bisexual
Relationship Status: Divorced twice; widower; currently single
Bloodline: Halfblood
Hometown: Heidelberg, Germany
Current Residence: Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, England
House & Year: Durmstrang 1968
Occupation: Psychiatrist for the DMLE
Wand: 10 in, hornbeam, manticore hair
Pet: None
Family
Father: Reinhold Amsel (wizard; Durmstrang 1935; magical shoe cobbler; b. September 30, 1916)
Mother: Brunhild Amsel (née Glöckner; witch; Beauxbatons 1938; magical seamstress; b. June 15, 1920)
Sister: Wilhelmina Beyersdorf (née Amsel; witch; Durmstrang 1964; tutor for magical children; b. May 4, 1946)
Brother-in-Law: Matthäus Beyersdorf (wizard; Durmstrang 1963; diplomat; b. December 19, 1944)
Nephew: Rüdiger Beyersdorf (wizard; Durmstrang 1988; translator; b. January 2, 1970)
Niece-in-Law: Milena Beyersdorf (née Simeonova; witch; Durmstrang 1988; b. January 3, 1970)
Great-Nephew: Nikolai Beyersdorf (wizard; Durmstrang 7th; b. May 1, 1993)
Great-Niece: Lilyana Beyersdorf (witch; Durmstrang 4th; b. September 17, 1995)
Great-Niece: Agnes Beyersdorf (witch; Durmstrang 1st; b. February 17, 1999)
Great-Nephew: Albert Beyersdorf (wizard; Durmstrang 1st; b. February 17, 1999)
Great-Nephew: Josef Beyersdorf (wizard; b. August 8, 2003)
Great-Niece: Gabriele Beyersdorf (witch; b. December 31, 2007)
Great-Niece: Tsveta Beyersdorf (witch; b. January 18, 2011)
Niece: Helga Sternberg (née Beyersdorf; witch; Durmstrang 1992; works in German Ministry's Dept of Magical Games and Sports; b. Feburary 14, 1974)
Nephew-in-Law: Jochim Sternberg (wizard; Durmstrang 1992; Beater for the Heidelberg Harriers; b. September 27, 1973)
Great-Niece: Gerlinde Sternberg (witch; Durmstrang 1st; b. May 2, 1998)
Great-Niece: Fritzi Sternberg (witch; b. April 1, 2001)
Great-Niece: Gisa Sternberg (witch; b. October 16, 2007)
Brother: Josef Amsel (wizard; b. November 3, 1953; d. February 7, 1958)
Sister: Sonja Wiegand (née Amsel; witch; Durmstrang 1974; novelist; b. October 31, 1955)
Brother-in-Law: Emil Wiegand (wizard; Durmstrang 1974; wireless news show host; b. July 9, 1956)
Niece: Brigitta Wiegand (witch; Durmstrang 1998; potionere; b. August 17, 1980)
Wife #1: Nadya Sokolova (witch; Durmstrang 1968; Healer; b. March 15, 1950) (married: June 3, 1972; divorced: August 6, 1978)
Son: Benedikt Amsel (wizard; Durmstrang 1992; mediwizard; b. September 30, 1973)
Daughter-in-Law: Nataliya Amsel (née Fyodorova; witch; Durmstrang 1993; mediwitch; b. August 29, 1975)
Grandson: Dmitri Amsel (wizard; Durmstrang 4th; b. July 18, 1996)
Granddaughter: Evgeniya Amsel (witch; Durmstrang 1st; b. October 2, 1998)
Wife #2: Anastasiya Konstantinova (witch; Durmstrang 1969; duellist; b. December 1, 1950) (married: December 25, 1978; divorced: December 31, 1985)
Son: Valentin Amsel (wizard; Durmstrang 1998; curse breaker; b. February 14, 1980)
Daughter-in-Law: Svetlana Amsel (née Vasilyeva; witch; Durmstrang 1999; photographer; b. November 18, 1980)
Granddaughter: Tatiana Amsel (witch; b. March 31, 2002)
Granddaughter: Katya Amsel (witch; b. June 6, 2006)
Daughter: Kristina Dragomirova (née Amsel; witch; Durmstrang 1999; architect; b. March 13, 1981)
Son-in-Law: Yasen Dragomirov (wizard; Durmstrang 1998; chef; b. June 22, 1981)
Grandson: Viktor Dragomirov (wizard; b. July 8, 2004)
Granddaughter: Magdalena Dragomirova (witch; b. April 27, 2007)
Partner #1: Bernhard Holtzer (wizard; Beauxbatons 1979; dancer; b. September 21, 1960) (together: March 7, 1987 - May 14, 1989)
Wife #3: Naomi Bernard (witch; Hufflepuff 1970; herbologist; b. May 4, 1952; d. November 14, 1997) (married: June 24, 1993)
Daughter: Abigail Amsel (witch; Gryffindor 6th; b. March 29, 1994)
Son: Peter Amsel (wizard; Hufflepuff 4th; b. April 18, 1996)
Daughter: Baby Girl Amsel (was due January 27, 1998)
Partner #2: Langdon Hathaway (muggle; psychiatrist; b. November 11, 1970) (together: December 31, 1999 - August 31, 2006)
History
Hans Dietrich Amsel was the second-born child of four to Reinhold and Brunhild Amsel. The Amsel family lived in post-WWII Heidelberg, under occupation by US Army troops. As they had during the simultaneous muggle and wizarding wars (WWII and Grindelwald's rise to power), the Amsel family just kept out of things and focused on working. Reinhold and Brunhild both had to work hard to support their little family, but at least their children learned the value of hard work. Born three years after older sister Wilhelmina, Hans was just shy of four years old when his brother Josef was born, and Josef was followed almost two years later by Sonja. The children were all good friends and playmates, in addition to being siblings. It was a great shock to them all when Josef contracted Dragon Pox when he was barely four years old, and they were all devastated when he died. At only just over two years old, Sonja didn't understand what was going on, and for years asked where Josef was.
Despite losing Josef so young, the family still grew up very close to each other, and though they were rather spread out in age, Wilhelmina, Hans, and Sonja still stayed close friends. All three attended Durmstrang, though only Hans shared the school with both sisters: Wilhelmina was already out of school and engaged to Matthäus Beyersdorf, her school sweetheart, by the time Sonja started, and Hans only spent his seventh year with Sonja also at the school. Though while Sonja was there, he tried to look out for her the best he could, while still focusing on his studies. After Josef's death, Hans had decided that he wanted to be a Healer, and that he wanted to help people who, like Josef, contracted magical bugs such as Dragon Pox. So in school, he focused primarily on the subjects that would get him into Healer training. Of course, his attention wasn't entirely on school: he met a pretty Russian girl, Nadya Sokolova, at school. They were in the same year, and she, too, aspired to becoming a Healer. After finishing school in 1968 and going through Healer training together, they married in 1972. Their only child, Benedikt, was born a year and a half later. Shortly after Benedikt's birth, however, Hans and Nadya started having problems. Hans had begun identifying as a bisexual in his early teens, when he realised that he was noticing the other boys around school nearly as often as he was noticing the girls, though it was a part of himself that he struggled to hide until he "got over it." By the time Benedikt was born, he'd come to the realisation that this was not a part of himself that he would just "get over," and when he came out to Nadya, she felt betrayed and lied to, and their marriage quickly fell apart.
It likely didn't help matters any that, as his marriage to Nadya was disintegrating, Hans got involved with another former schoolmate while in the process of his divorce from Nadya: Anastasiya Konstantinova, who had been a year behind them at Durmstrang. Hans had been on a temporary rotation into Spell Damage (the start of a career-change to that department) when Anastasiya, now a duellist, ended up under his wand as he healed a particularly nasty curse she'd caught in her latest match. Almost as soon as Hans' divorce from Nadya was finalised, he proposed to Anastasiya, and they were married within months. After the disaster that was his coming out to Nadya, Hans tried even harder to suppress his bisexuality, and he and Anastasiya had two children together: son Valentin on Valentine's Day in 1980, and daughter Kristina just over a year later. Benedikt moved back and forth between his parents' houses, and so he got to know and spend time with his younger half-siblings, and though he never called Anastasiya "mom," she still welcomed him as part of the family. Unfortunately, Benedikt turned into a pawn of his mother's, and one time when he was over at his dad's house, he asked him (in front of Anastasiya) why Nadya referred to Hans as a "filthy, sinful sodomizer." Nadya's plan to destroy Hans' happiness succeeded, and Anastasiya, when faced with the same betrayal, did just as Nadya had done: divorced Hans, though she sued for full custody of Valentin and Kristina, which resulted in him being completely cut off from them until they reached seventeen.
It had been a hard lesson to learn, but after Anastasiya, Hans was more open about his sexuality, and he began more openly seeking the company of both women and men. Although he was not particularly looking for another serious relationship, not after what had happened with Nadya and Anastasiya, that was what he found when he met Bernhard Holtzer, a young dancer nearly 11 years his junior. They were only together two years (but two wonderful years!) when Hans began contemplating a career shift from healing of the body to healing of the mind: psychiatry. The schools he was looking at were mostly in England, though, and Bernhard didn't want to leave Germany. Bernhard didn't want to stand in the way of Hans' career, and Hans couldn't ask Bernhard to leave everything he knew, so they parted amicably while they still could, and a year later, Hans moved to London to earn his degrees in psychology from a muggle university. While studying in the muggle world, he still worked at St Mungo's, mostly to stay connected to the wizarding world, but also because he still loved healing.
He was partway through his first degree in psychology when he met Naomi Bernard, a lovely British witch. She was an herbologist, and he'd stopped into her shoppe one day to replenish some supplies. The began seeing each other, and Hans was upfront with her from the start about his previous marriages and why they ended, and his relationship with Bernhard. They were married in the summer of 1993, and Benedikt travelled to London from Germany to attend the wedding … with a fiancée of his own: Nataliya Fyodorova, whom he'd met in school. Benedikt apologised to his father for the part he'd unwittingly played in the dissolution of Hans' marriage to Anastasiya, and he brought with him pictures of Valentin and Kristina, now thirteen and twelve and students at Durmstrang. When Benedikt got married himself less than a year later, Hans and Naomi travelled to Germany with Benedikt's newest half-sister, baby Abigail, who had been born that March. As happy as he was to see his eldest get married while his youngest slept peacefully in his wife's arms, Hans regretted that he was still unable to visit either Valentin or Kristina yet. The war was starting to heat up in England with the (at the time, wildly contested) return of Voldemort when Hans was blessed with both a fifth child, son Peter, and a first grandchild, Benedikt's first child Dmitri, born exactly three months apart. As it became clear that Voldemort was indeed back — Hans had "missed out" on Voldemort's first reign of terror, having still been in Germany, but Naomi had lived through it as a young adult — they became more concerned with their family's safety, particularly because Naomi barely qualified as a half-blood, with a muggle mother and a muggleborn father. Their fears were made all the worse when Naomi and her father were called before the Ministry during the summer of 1997, accused of stealing magic. Naomi was four months pregnant with their third child when she and her father were sentenced to Azkaban in August. She died three months later. For the first time, Hans found himself alone not because of divorce, not because of an amicable parting, but because Naomi had been ripped from him. And having two young children at home, while he was still finishing up his second degree in psychology, still working at the hospital, that year was the hardest in Hans' life.
The bright spot to it all was that Hans and his little children survived the war. He was fully certified as a psychiatrist, and that summer after the war, 1998, he could finally bring Abigail and Peter with him to Germany for a family reunion with all of his children: Benedikt and his wife Nataliya and their son Dmitri (Nataliya expecting their second child, daughter Evgeniya, who was born that October); and finally Valentin and Kristina, both of them being over seventeen, so Hans was no longer forced to remain out of their lives. Aside from pictures that Benedikt sent along, Hans hadn't seen his second and third children since Valentin was five and Kristina four. Although things were awkward, Benedikt had remained close to his half-siblings in Hans' absence, and he worked hard to mend the bridges that he had burned down all those years before. By the time Hans returned to England with Abigail and Peter, he had tentatively built new bonds with Valentin and Kristina and strengthened his bond with Benedikt. Dmitri and Peter, meanwhile, became fast friends, so Hans started arranging for visits between England and Germany, which kept him hopping between working at St Mungo's both as a Healer and as a psychiatrist helping survivors of the war deal with their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Over the next year and a half, Hans occasionally saw women and even a few men, but while he wasn't particularly looking for anyone, he was a little lonely: although he had reconnected with his children, and he'd apologised to both Nadya and Anastasiya, and even visited Bernhard and his new partner, he felt more than ever the loss of Naomi.
On New Year's Eve 1999, Hans was invited to join some of his old classmates from the psychology department for a party. There, he met Langdon Hathaway, a young man he'd taken several courses with over the years. They hit it off that night, aided by beer, wine, and champagne, and when the clock hit midnight, they kissed. Abigail and Peter were in Germany, visiting Benedikt, Nataliya, Dmitri, and Evgeniya, so Hans invited Langdon home with him. Hans and Langdon were together for six and a half years, but during that time, the strain of keeping Hans' magical heritage secret was too much, especially with the children starting to accidentally use magic around the house, and wanting to talk about the magical world. Hans loved Langdon, but he had been burned twice before for holding back secrets, and he couldn't do it again, couldn't come clean with the truth and be left for a third time. Their relationship started going downhill in early 2006, and officially ended at the end of the summer.
During those six years, Hans was blessed with two more weddings and three more grandchildren: Valentin married his sister's best friend, Svetlana, in 2000, and they had two little girls: Tatiana in March 2002 and Katya in June 2006. Kristina "retaliated" by marrying her brother's best friend, Yasen, in 2003, and had a son Viktor in July 2004. And Abigail went off to Hogwarts in 2005, where she was sorted into Gryffindor. And 2006 also brought yet another career change: shortly after he broke things off with Langdon, Hans learned about a new job opening up in the Ministry of Magic, a newly-created position in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, a psychiatrist to work with the employees of the department. Needing a change following his breakup, Hans applied and got the job. He enjoyed the change, and over the following years, his sixth grandchild was born (Kristina's second, a daughter Magdalena in April 2007), Peter and Dmitri went off to school in 2007 (Peter to Hogwarts: Hufflepuff, and Dmitri to Durmstrang) and Evgeniya joined her brother at Durmstrang in 2010. Hans took a break from dating, figuring that as he was nearing his sixties, he was simply too old for it now. He was glad to just spend his time with his kids and grandkids, both in England and Germany, and focusing on his job. He posed a few departmental experiments, in the name of helping increase communication among the employees and also to help them cope with emotional upsets. The idea of using inter-connected journals is his latest experiment.
Personality
Hans has learned a lot over the years. The hardest lesson he has learned was to accept his own sexuality and to be open about it. He was fourteen when he started realising he was different, that he was looking at other boys in the same way he was looking at girls, and that he was having similar thoughts about them. At first, he thought it was just some weird phase he was going through, or some kind of normal teenage thing, just something that everybody does but nobody talks about. So he ignored it and explained it away for years, more vehemently as he got older and nothing changed. He still fancied girls, at least, so he told himself that he could still be normal. He dated girls, he talked to his friends about girls, his first major relationships were with women. When he finally started coming to grips to it and came out to his wife, and when she reacted so negatively, Hans shut down. He tried even harder to repress that side of himself, he jumped immediately into another relationship with a woman, and he convinced himself that he could have kept his dirty little secret forever. When his secret was so glaringly exposed, he finally realised that he was hurting himself the most by keeping his sexuality hidden. It was too hard to keep lying about it, so he just … stopped. He worked hard to accept his sexuality, and opened himself up to the possibility of a relationship with another man. And although he isn't necessarily OUT AND PROUD, announcing to everyone he meets that he is bisexual, he won't deny it if he's asked, he'll clarify anyone's misunderstandings, and he's always upfront about it whenever he's about to start a romantic relationship with somebody. He has sat down with all of his children at some point and explained to them what it means, and he has tried to impress upon all of them that it's okay to not be heterosexual, that people who are homosexual or bisexual are not bad, there's nothing "wrong" with them.
The other big lesson that he has had to learn is how to be a father. He was only a part-time father to Benedikt for twelve years, with his first wife having primary custody of him, and he had no part at all in Valentin or Kristina's lives from his divorce when they were toddlers until they were 18 and 17, respectively. With the imprisonment and death of his third wife, he was left as the only caregiver for his two very young children, and he very quickly had to learn how hard it was to hold down a full-time job, finish up his degree, and raise a three-year-old and a one-year-old. His family is pretty much Hans' entire life. He devotes himself to his current romantic partner, of course, but his children simply have to come first. No matter his own feelings for a potential partner, if his children have a problem with him or her, then they simply have to go. It has been somewhat easier on Hans since Abigail and Peter have gone off to school, but any prospects still have to pass the "kid test." He loves traveling to Germany to visit his eldest three children and his six grandchildren (as well as his nieces and nephews and their children), and he makes reconnecting with Benedikt, Valentin, and Kristina an absolute priority in his life.
At 61, Hans is obviously well-capable of buckling down and being serious, of taking his job seriously, and his job is very serious. The mental and emotional well-being of his patients is in his hands, and it is not something that he takes lightly. But at the same time, he isn't just the stoic, serious type. He can be very flamboyant, funny, and fun-loving. He believes in the power of humour in psychiatry, and he aims for a more light-hearted tone at times to loosen people up when he's talking to them in a professional capacity. On very rare occasions, if he believes it's necessary to help lighten up the entire Department, he's been known to wear a feather boa into the office. He's also been known to prescribe that very thing (wearing a feather boa around the office) to employees who he thinks would do well to loosen up. He collectively refers to the employees of the Department as his "little duckies" and whenever he's wandering around the office when he doesn't have any appointments, he makes a point of asking after family members. And sometimes he makes it seem like he's judging your mental state based solely on your workspace. He doesn't, though … unless there's something psychologically significant about the precise way in which you stack your files.