Remigration

Three very different people meet on a rubber dinghy carrying refugees from Tunisia to the Italian island of Lampedusa. A reporter from Berlin, Alan, who is looking for a story incognito, a pretty young woman, Lerato, from Tanzania, who wants to go to Berlin for adventure, and a deserter, Feven, from Eritrea, who has been sentenced to death at home. In a desperate situation, the boat is picked up by an NGO boat and taken to Piombino. From there, the refugees are given the choice of being taken to Germany by bus or staying in Italy. Lerato and Feven travel to Germany and are taken to the initial reception center in Ellwangen. Alan follows them and gives them a home at his apartment in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The three get on well and Alan writes a successful story about their escape across the Mediterranean. So much for a largely realistic part of the plot. Now the plot turns into fiction and becomes a vision of the author: In Germany, a new party, the JvI, wins the general election. It has clear goals, one of which is the remigration of 1.5 million people from Germany. It slowly becomes clear to the reader how this is supposed to happen: the re-migrants are accommodated in sufficiently comfortable containers, transported to Hamburg by truck, transferred to a container ship and taken to the west coast of Africa. There they are forced to switch to rubber boats and land on the nearby coast. The route of their escape is essentially mirrored. The remigration inflatable boats are distributed across the numerous West African countries that are completely overwhelmed by this invasion. The third part now describes Feven and Lerato's journey across Africa from Mauritania to Tanzania, during which they were trapped in the clutches of Boko Haram in Nigeria for a long time. The description of the circumstances there gives the reader clues as to why people flee Africa in the first place.