Orange on blue, a dinghy overcrowded with people, surrounded by nothing but ocean. The image of refugees on the Mediterranean has become familiar over the last years, and has become a symbol of one of today’s most urgent challenges to Europe’s global role. The pictures might have been shocking in the beginning, but the media using the image over and over again soon tended to dull the audience, giving the (wrong) impression that the story is clear and long understood. German filmmaker Philip Scheffner had started working on a documentary about refugees long before the “peak” of thousands arriving in Germany in 2015. While scrolling through YouTube, he found a clip that intrigued him with the bright blue of the ocean. It was a 3-minute video taping an ocean cruiser’s encounter with a refugee boat in September 2012. The “Adventure of the Seas” reported the sighting of a damaged boat, with 13 people on board, to Spanish coastguard, and was requested to stay on-site until the sea rescue arrived. The encounter lasted 90 minutes.
Thursday, April 12. 2018
HAVARIE: Colliding stories
Orange on blue, a dinghy overcrowded with people, surrounded by nothing but ocean. The image of refugees on the Mediterranean has become familiar over the last years, and has become a symbol of one of today’s most urgent challenges to Europe’s global role. The pictures might have been shocking in the beginning, but the media using the image over and over again soon tended to dull the audience, giving the (wrong) impression that the story is clear and long understood. German filmmaker Philip Scheffner had started working on a documentary about refugees long before the “peak” of thousands arriving in Germany in 2015. While scrolling through YouTube, he found a clip that intrigued him with the bright blue of the ocean. It was a 3-minute video taping an ocean cruiser’s encounter with a refugee boat in September 2012. The “Adventure of the Seas” reported the sighting of a damaged boat, with 13 people on board, to Spanish coastguard, and was requested to stay on-site until the sea rescue arrived. The encounter lasted 90 minutes.
Philip Scheffner tracked down the maker of the video to be Terry Diamond from Ireland. He was also able to find the men that had been on the dinghy, some of them in Spain, some had been sent back to Algeria. Together with his partner Merle Kröger, Scheffner went to Ireland, Algeria, France and Spain to record interviews with all the people involved in the encounter to make a documentary. When in 2015 the amount of people arriving in Germany and therewith the public reception of refugees had shifted dramatically, Scheffner’s team decided to make a radical cut: They decided to throw away the images of their interviews, using only the audios, while on the visual level using the 3-minute clip by Terry, stretching it to 90 minutes. Havarie premiered at Berlinale 2016 and won the German Film Critics Award 2017.
Merle Kröger took the true encounter on the Mediterranean as a starting point to write a novel, the German title being Havarie, as the film, the English translation is called Collision. In her novel, Kröger shows multiple perspectives on the event. From chapter to chapter the narration switches between different characters, inspired by the real protagonists she met while producing the documentary with Scheffner. They allow the reader a glance behind the scenes of the glamorous ocean cruiser, introducing Jo, the lounge singer who dreams of recording his album, meanwhile making extra money on the cruiser by dating well-off older ladies; Marwan, who went to medical school in Syria and is now working night shifts in the ship’s laundry room; Leon, first officer at the age of 26, who feels “jedi-like” having the fate of 3778 passengers and 1259 crew members in his hands.
Each of the staff has their own story, their own ambitions, their own crisis. For most of them the refugee boat is nothing more than a small disruption in between working routines. But the reader can’t blame these characters for their indifference, because Kröger makes each individual story comprehensible and authentic. The Irish tourist is not only the gawker who films the scene with his smartphone, but we find out through his flashbacks that he is traumatized since his brother died as a teenager in the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s. The reader also learns about the Algerian people smuggler Karim, whose wife is waiting for him in Spain. Or Diego, from a family of fishermen, who now works for the Spanish sea rescue and is glad to have a secure job: the more people need help, the safer his job is.
Translated into English in 2017, Merle Kröger’s book is still as current as it was in 2015 when the German original was first published. The number of dead and missing in the Mediterranean sea has dramatically increased since. All the more do we need stories that show the complexity of the topic and tell individual narratives rather than creating faceless masses.
See Philip Scheffner’s Havarie installed at the Goethe-Institut Toronto until May 31. Merle Kröger’s book is part of the accompanying reading room.
by Eva Morlang, Leipzig-based journalist
Merle Kröger took the true encounter on the Mediterranean as a starting point to write a novel, the German title being Havarie, as the film, the English translation is called Collision. In her novel, Kröger shows multiple perspectives on the event. From chapter to chapter the narration switches between different characters, inspired by the real protagonists she met while producing the documentary with Scheffner. They allow the reader a glance behind the scenes of the glamorous ocean cruiser, introducing Jo, the lounge singer who dreams of recording his album, meanwhile making extra money on the cruiser by dating well-off older ladies; Marwan, who went to medical school in Syria and is now working night shifts in the ship’s laundry room; Leon, first officer at the age of 26, who feels “jedi-like” having the fate of 3778 passengers and 1259 crew members in his hands.
Each of the staff has their own story, their own ambitions, their own crisis. For most of them the refugee boat is nothing more than a small disruption in between working routines. But the reader can’t blame these characters for their indifference, because Kröger makes each individual story comprehensible and authentic. The Irish tourist is not only the gawker who films the scene with his smartphone, but we find out through his flashbacks that he is traumatized since his brother died as a teenager in the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s. The reader also learns about the Algerian people smuggler Karim, whose wife is waiting for him in Spain. Or Diego, from a family of fishermen, who now works for the Spanish sea rescue and is glad to have a secure job: the more people need help, the safer his job is.
Translated into English in 2017, Merle Kröger’s book is still as current as it was in 2015 when the German original was first published. The number of dead and missing in the Mediterranean sea has dramatically increased since. All the more do we need stories that show the complexity of the topic and tell individual narratives rather than creating faceless masses.
See Philip Scheffner’s Havarie installed at the Goethe-Institut Toronto until May 31. Merle Kröger’s book is part of the accompanying reading room.
by Eva Morlang, Leipzig-based journalist
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