|
In 2015, author Merle Kröger located an entire novel on the Mediterranean: on a body of water that has had to be considered not only a highly frequented connective zone but at the same time a strictly observed border region. The events around which everything in this novel centers are the maritime distress of a refugee boat with a damaged motor off the Spanish coast; the boat's sighting by a cruise ship with the telling name 'Spirit of Europe'; and the encounter of both with a Spanish coast guard rescue vessel and with a container ship. The novel's original German title, "Havarie", whose literal English translation "average" fails to convey the word's complex meaning, is the nautical designation for malfunctions and accidents suffered by maritime vehicles; and it is also the older insurance-technical term for contributory distribution in the salvaging of a ship (above all through jettisoning of freight and the "sacrifice" of certain parts of the ship). The title of the 2017 English translation, "Collision", opens up a third dimension: the collision of different seascapes in a shipwreck's context. Correspondingly, both the polylogic contents and the multi-perspectivism of Kröger's novel attach a different relationship to the world and the environment to different kinds of boat: the "boat people" on their very basic water vehicles see their situation above all through the prism of circulating stories and rumors, myths and fables; on the cruiser, we find a temporally removed economy of consumeristic attentiveness that allows the sea to vanish beneath a "display" of the all-encompassing service and entertainment offerings; and the coast guard ship is fully oriented toward speedily detecting and approaching a target. [...] As the afterword itself underscores, the book, although a work of fiction, was based on documentary research. And its starting point was found footage - the jetsam of a data-ocean. Namely, by coincidence Kröger, together with her collaborator, the filmmaker Philipp Scheffner, came across a YouTube video recorded by the Northern Irishman Terry Diamond in 2012 off the Spanish coast, on board the "Adventure of the Seas". They researched the background, met Diamond, obtained the relevant radio recordings from the Spanish coast guard, and finally interviewed and filmed both the cruiser's personnel and a number of refugees. When in 2015 Mediterranean crossings from North Africa multiplied and the mass media issued alarmist reports of a "refugee crisis," Scheffner and Kröger wanted to do more than simply contribute their already-produced documentary film to the image flood. They decided on a new approach involving something like parallel literary and filmic action: Kröger shaped what had been researched into a possible scenario; and Scheffner worked with the video recordings as image material and with both the radio and interview recordings as sound material.
|
