Mohile Parikh Centre for Contemporary Culture (MPC3), Bombay
March 25th , 2005
4.00 pm – 5.00 pm

Reading from:
Cut!
A German novel about the journey of a woman through a dark chapter of Indo-German history.

As the last meters of film are running through the projector of an old cinema in Hamburg, it is also the last show for Madita Junghans in her dream profession as a cinema programmer. What now? Madita’s family is in the far north of Germany, she has Indian features and no idea what to do. However, her boyfriend Nick convinces her to start a new career as private eye. To gain some practice “Nick and Mattie” start with the search for Madita’s biological father. All she knows about this man is that he is Indian. But where to start looking? Her mother has been cocooned in a psychotic dream world for years, and her stepfather Hinnarck is anything but a talkative person. This may seem a rather bad starting point for investigation – yet Nick and Mattie soon find themselves in the middle of a dark and tumultuous chapter of Indo-German relations...

Writing a crime novel was motivated by the idea to link different periods of German-Indian relations in the past 70 years along with personal experience. The story of Mattie and Nick is a semi-authentic road movie, where historical, biographical and purely fictional elements are woven into a cinematic script. Set between Hamburg, London and Bombay, this story tells of fascination and exploitation, of alienation and the paradox of what we believe to know.

(“Cut!” Crime novel by Merle Kröger, Argument Publishing House, Hamburg 2003, Paperback, Germany)

Merle Kroeger is a film-maker, writer and curator, based in Berlin. She has worked as a director and editor for documentaries and video art since 1991. As a curator she worked for the 5th International Werkleitz Biennale, the International Documentary Festival Kassel and Volksbühne Berlin. In 2003 she published her first novel “Cut!”. Since 2004 she has been working as filmmaker and curator for the project Import Export.

Respondent: Mitra Mukherjee Parikh, literary scholar (Bombay)

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