DAS VERSAGEN

//// ON THE BEACH

/Yussif. Eog, Tamin, and all their names are standing there. On the shore. Looking across the sea to the horizon. With hope, a fearful heart and powerlessness. They all want to escape the violence, the hunger, the lack of freedom, the persecution, the mental tensions. They see in the distance, where the sun is setting, their only chance for a dignified life in which they want to be involved. The setting red sun is for them the beacon for the glowing warm-hearted arrival in life.

/If only they could get there. Across the sea. They say that hope dies last – what a trivialising phrase! It dies on the open sea. Dreadfully and mercilessly, washed up somewhere as a limp body days later. All hope drowned or died of thirst. And if not there, then it dies successfully on the horizon, on the saving shore, at the latest there in one of the numerous peripheral camps. Without dignity, without a state, disenfranchised and hushed up. The sun that promises hope is not red, no, it is in fact white and left out, extinguished or blanked out ice-cold. Nothing of its warm-hearted glow shines on this shore.

//// ON THE BEACH

/Scene change. Everyone knows the disappointment of trying to photograph a sunset, and never is the sun yellow or orange or bright red, but always just white and its surroundings coloured. It is a blind spot, an omission, unpresentable. On the other hand, on the beach, sitting on the dune, the setting sun is not only fiery red itself, but at the same time the water, sky, beach and dune are drenched in light and colour. The whole scenery resembles a huge, radiant space of colour. A universe of light, colour and infinite expanse in which I, the viewer, am right in the middle.

/Thousands of kilometres apart, the two evening scenes on the beach could not be more different. There overshadowed by existential fear, despair and deathly courage, here the spectacle of a sublime, colossal experience of nature with a high feel-good factor. And yet both happen in view of the same sun.

/The same sun: that means that both scenes belong together. That at the end both suns are white, faded out, also belongs together. It is so simple, but so infinitely bitter.