RIDICULOUS DARKNESS

A Somali pirate asks the Hamburg regional court for understanding of his attack on the cargo ship MS Taipan, and laments the loss of his friend Tofdau. Main-Sergeant Pellner and Corporal Dorsch take a patrol boat into the rainforests of Afghanistan. Their mission: the liquidation of a crazy lieutenant. The journey leads them deeper and deeper into a turbulent world in which colonial history and neo-colonial realities are inextricably linked. They continue to move away from so-called civilization, into the wilderness and darkness. When the drowned pirate Tofdau unexpectedly returns to the story and asks for help in the darkness, he is shot by Field Sargend Pellner. For in this narrative there is no place for a stranger.

Whispering, filigree, ironic, and at the same time endlessly sad, Wolfram Lotz describes in his radio drama our inability to really understand strangers: the horror of a distant war, of another culture, another human being, and finally even of oneself.