Merle Kröger: Panorama

A text by Merle Kröger inaugurates the Howdunnit series – part crime literature, part archival research – examining how different modes of investigation converge and diverge. Navina Sundaram sits in an editing suite in Hamburg. She has managed to condense the complexity of the Kemal Altun case into the required two minutes and forty seconds for a political magazine – a journalistic feat, given the dense legal terminology and the international political context. She places her interview with the trial judge towards the end, foregrounding the republic’s most well-known deportation detainee. The phone rings. She answers. Peter says, “Did you hear? Kemal jumped out of the courtroom window. He’s dead.”