Marc-Uwe Kling’s “Views” is pure explosive
A 16-year-old girl goes missing, then a video goes viral showing the girl being abused. The perpetrators are allegedly Africans. The collective consciousness is heating up, the right-wing calls for revenge. A group called “Active Home Protection” takes up arms. But what if the video is false?
Currently, artificial intelligence is the topic of the day. Marc-Uwe Kling has made it the subject of his new novel “Views”. The former cabaret artist bothers him. Words, sentences, formulations are spinning around in his head. An idea takes shape, he has to put it on paper. The result could have the subtitle “Foundation of a real event”. It is a manifesto, a revelation. Here is a chronicle of events. No completeness is guaranteed.
Yasira is turning 40. She is German, more than she wants to admit. Stefan is sitting opposite her in the Hard Rock Cafe on Kurfürstendamm. Yet another Stefan, Yasira thinks. Her thoughts wander. She is distracted. In general, Stefan is more handsome than the last Stefan. Yasira is a detective assistant at the BKA. Her boss is also called Stefan. Her date Stefan is excited: “Can you tell me where you come from?” Yasira: “From Wilmersdorf. By subway.” She often makes this joke. Her parents are from Lebanon.
When Yasira disappears into the toilets and returns, Stefan sits enchanted in front of his phone screen. It’s a video. The content is explosive. Yasira recognizes it immediately. The date is over.
Lena Palmer
The video shows a girl named Lena Palmer. The 16-year-old has been missing for a few days and suddenly appears to have appeared at a rest stop along a hiking trail in Germany. She is lying on a table, three men are standing around. A fourth films the brutal rape of the girls. The three men at the table are all black. One has curly hair, the other is wearing a baseball cap backwards, the third is wearing a Snoopy sweater.
Yasira’s BKA agent Stefan assigns the case to her. She is to find Lena, preferably alive, and identify the four unknown men in the video. The case goes viral and the public is shocked. The right-wing extremists are raising a fuss and calling for revenge. The police are under great pressure. The pressure is growing.
“Active Home Protection”
Yasira forms a team. She has no clues as to the origin of the video, the possible crime scene or the time of the crime. The men could come from Mali. At least one possibility. Then another video appears. “Bear”, leader of “Active Home Protection”, holds a weapon in his hand and calls for vigilantism in violent words. It is not long before the first victim: a black man whose baseball cap becomes his fatal mistake.
Another video, another right-wing extremist, another victim. Unlike “Bär”, the copycat is known to the police. But this does not bring any breakthrough in the case, because the victim is once again an innocent person. The situation becomes increasingly risky for Yasira as anger grows among the population, fueled by right-wing extremist hate propaganda on the internet. A violent crowd even threatens to storm the Reichstag. Several people die.
Yasira is baffled: Why are there no traces? No signs of Lena, the perpetrator in the video? And yet there are hundreds of clues from the public. A video that Yasira’s daughter, also called Lena, shows her sparks an idea in Yasira’s mind. But could it really be true? Could it really be a fake, created by an AI? She has to find out, in secret. Because if she is wrong, she and the entire police force would be ridiculed and exploited by the right against “the pompous ones”, the “deep state”. The spiral of violence would spin even faster. Is there a risk of civil war?
But what if Yasira is right and has a perfect fake in her hands? Then AI would be the new atom bomb.
Kling: A thriller?
A shocking scenario. But one that could really happen. Or to put it another way: If it did happen, no one would be surprised. A scenario that kept bestselling author Marc-Uwe Kling awake. In the end, he wrote it down and, of course, narrated it himself as an audio book. His new work “Ansichten” was published by Ullstein and Hamburg Audiobuch. It is Kling’s first thriller and impressively shows the author’s skills and diversity. His works are always successful, regardless of whether they are dystopian (“Qualitätsland”), fantastic (“Die Spurenfinder”) or child-friendly (“Das NEINhorn”).
We should not forget the series of stories about the communist Kangaroo, who once stood on the doorstep of the little artist Marc-Uwe Kling and turned his life upside down by carrying out his eloquent, pointed and hilarious challenges. The Kangaroo left a deep mark on Kling’s memories, not only for his roommate, but also for a million fans. He even founded his own boxing club, whose rules are: “The first rule of the boxing club: We don’t talk about the boxing club. The second rule of the boxing club: We don’t talk about the boxing club. The third rule of the boxing club: If you see a Nazi, box him!” In our present day, that means: Plenty of Training!
Kling’s anarchic humor does not disappear in “Views”. The humor is, after all, laughing in the eyes of misery. Nevertheless, the novel’s plot is nothing other than not funny. The language is light, the story flows smoothly, without embellishments, always straight to the goal. “Views” is confusing. Resist the beginnings! Anyone who has read the novel or listened to the audiobook recording cannot say: “I had no idea …” (Author’s note: This text was not created by artificial intelligence!)
In light of Marc-Uwe Kling’s new novel “Views,” some critical reviews have pointed to the possible use of artificial intelligence to create convincing fake videos. As the investigation into Lena Palmer’s case progresses, the question arises whether the viral video of her injury could be artificial intelligence, further fueling the discussion about right-wing populism and its manipulation of information.
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2024-06-30 15:42:16
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