Europa mit schwerer Havarie bei Merle Kröger

[Machine translation] A YouTube video about the encounter between a cruise ship and a refugee boat gave writer, screenwriter and film producer Merle Kröger the inspiration for her novel Havarie (2015). The life stages of eleven characters (migrants, holidaymakers, cruise ship, sea rescue and freight workers) intersect over a period of two nights and one day in the Mediterranean; the clash of different worlds resulting from these encounters is told soberly and mercilessly from the alternating perspectives of all main characters., But Havarie is not only a novel of the present time, which depicts the wave of migrants from Africa, but also one of recent world history because of its allusions to conflicts in Ukraine, Algeria, Syria, Northern Ireland and the Philippines, which visually depict black and white images at the end of the volume. Since history takes place “not only in time but also in space” (Schlögel), the sea in particular acquires a supporting function, both as a permeable border and transition area and as a landscape with invisible yet distinct boundaries, which shows that the possession-indicating adjective in the term mare nostrum has lost the connotation of inclusion and commonality in favor of exclusion and alterity. , Among the ships and boats that criss-cross the Mediterranean, the cruise ship plays a particularly important role: It represents a multilingual microcosm which — as its name The Spirit of Europe reveals — synthesizes the essence of a continent and exposes the social inequality, exploitation, indifference, greed for money, lack of contact, superficiality and egoism that characterize it: Failure is therefore not only the refugees' inflatable boat, but also Europe and people., After all, the literary genre to which accident belongs is important: The text is a crime novel that was number 1 on the best crime fiction list of the time for months. Jo, a Filipino singer from the cruise ship, is missing, but the traditional sequence of a crime thriller is missing almost as much as the investigation and the investigator figure. But the crime is certain: multiple murders. About Jo (maybe), about the refugees who are turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave, and about humanity. The central question of crime literature “whodunit?” (Alewyn) stays and the answer is left to the reader and his conscience. But as a European and human being, isn't the reader himself a murderer?