Gabriele Riedle’s novel: “In Jungles. In deserts. At war” – culture

In the end, only a white spot remains on the map after the last shifting dune has swept across the desert with a lot of noise and banging. No atlas will help anyone looking for orientation here, especially not the Diercke World Atlas from 1973. Gabriele Riedle’s first-person narrator in the novel “In Junglen. In Wüsten. Im Krieg” was always of good service in preparing her adventurous journeys did.

In Berlin, on Goethestrasse in Charlottenburg, lying on her floor-to-ceiling “west-eastern divan,” she had checked where exactly Afghanistan might be, or Papua New Guinea, Liberia, or Mongolia, Tibet, New York, but definitely also 1973 still really existing “independent political unit West Berlin”. This first-person narrator was one of the “heroes in the service of adventure & enlightenment” for a long time, as the book says, she earned her money as a writer of travel reports, and this required preparation.

Because such reports are usually about distant countries and foreign peoples, in short, exoticism of all kinds, a photographer is usually required to capture everything in bright images so that what is seen and experienced abroad can be understood by the readers readers of the so-called civilized world can be printed and sold in magazines on glossy paper. Gabriele Riedle’s novel is largely about how the first-person narrator, commissioned by an editor-in-chief and accompanied by a photographer and often a translator, travels through the most remote parts of the world – and how she then returns to Goethestrasse, to “dog poo, traffic lights, pharmacy”, to her apartment opposite a former “post office building, where mainly Russian artists now lived”, who “all wear beards and blouses like Tolstoy”.

What she sees and experiences is really amazing. In Kabul, for example, where the reporter has been staying with dozens of other reporters in a makeshift prison that has since been converted into a hotel, she comes across a photographer who, in the country where pictures are prohibited by law, has photographed the Taliban, who are holding hands and looking intimately at each other. Then again it gets shrilly funny when she watches gay porn on her cell phone with excited young black people in a car in Lagos while she is on the phone with her editor-in-chief from Hamburg: “Hello, yes, I’m stuck in traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos, someone wants to sell me an ironing board through the window and we’ll probably all fall into the water together with the bridge right away, but if there’s signal in the broth down there, I’ll call you back later.”

Curiosities follow curiosities: the natives of Papua New Guinea, who proudly and self-confidently wear large-checked jackets from the international used clothing collection with their imposing feather headdress. Or the translator who dreams in the Gobi desert that Mongolia will soon submit to Russia because of its just discovered excess of mineral resources and that “the former Soviet superiority will also be forced to introduce the vertical Old Mongolian script”, whereupon everything is happily restored would be like in the 13th century under Genghis Khan.

Alongside all of this, however, there is also another tone, an opposing track that is audible and visible from the first page. “In Jungles. In Deserts. At War” is indeed “a kind of adventure novel,” as the subtitle states. But at the same time the book is an epitaph, the mourning for a loved one.

At the suggestion of her editor-in-chief, the reporter met the British photographer Tim H., who has been awarded the highest prizes, at the children’s carousel in Bryant Park in New York and introduced him to the readers with his open white shirt as a romantic hero, a kind of Lord Byron of war photography . Later she travels with him through Liberia, where they meet former child soldiers, a “naked ass general”, the completely insane “General Eagle” or a war criminal who has since become a priest. They talk to plenty of dubious women who, after years in American exile as senators or police chiefs, have installed themselves in positions of power with even more political ambitions – and later, hey presto, go to jail for embezzlement. In between, the love affair between the photographer and the narrator begins. But while everything else always goes according to plan – nothing comes of it. A few months later, Tim H. is blown to pieces by a grenade in Misrata – at the beginning of the book, the reporter hears the news of his death on the radio at home.

Open detailed view

It actually takes the whole art of the “tailor’s soul”, as she describes herself ironically, in order to sew together the brightly colored and gloomy strands of this book, which are diametrically opposed to their mental temperature, in such a way that in the end they produce an elegant and perfectly fitting piece of reportage and result in reflection haute couture. The narrative pace is high, the sentences swing effortlessly over entire paragraphs, and so it goes on Karl-May- and Karl-Marx-Straße in Radebeul, with short interruptions at Hegelplatz in Stuttgart or Berlin, together with “Kara Bint Nemsi, the daughter of the German” and the world spirit on horseback criss-crossing a world that, the further the story goes, the more menacingly it seems to be out of joint.

The great predecessors in the war reporter trade, Martha Gellhorn and Lee Miller, also feature, of course. While Lee Miller took a photogenic bath in Hitler’s bathtub on April 30, 1945, the first-person narrator has at least “a shower with the bin Ladens” in Kabul to show for it. And yet, in the end there is a great emptiness in a majestic desert picture. Since the journalistic maxim for reports has been to create a “feel good” and the editor-in-chief has been fired, since the joints crunch from all the running through the world and even the shifting dune has stopped moving, the reporter seems to have been referred to the home couch to be. Until the addiction to the “hard drug reality” becomes irresistible again and everything starts all over again: “continue, keep going, somewhere, nowhere”.