The photographer Marcel Mayer was born and grew up on the Ahr. He witnessed the flooding in July 2021 in his parents' house and photographed the people in the flood area in the days, weeks and months afterwards. Since then he has seen his homeland with different eyes.
"The darkest night" for Marcel Mayer is July 14-15, 2021. He is with his parents at his childhood home in Ahrweiler, just outside the city walls. Because it's raining so much, he came home a little early. Mayer is worried. "On the way there were fire brigades with boats on the trailers," he tells ntv.de. "I knew then that it was something different than usual."
Mayer grew up on the Ahr - with the flood. "The last was in 2016. Then the cellars will fill up." The experiences of a lifetime. On July 14, 2021, at eight in the evening, the power went out and Mayer asked his parents to go upstairs. "My father laughed at me, but he did it." After that, events blur.
Mayer doesn't get much sleep that night. "It was pitch dark and there were terrible noises." When he steps out the door at five the next morning, nothing is the same as before. "On the other side of the street, the water was up to the basement of the houses. In the gardens, which are a little lower, there were cars, containers, parts of bridges, rubbish."
In the next six months, Mayer hardly gets any rest. "We had no electricity, no water, nothing at all. I first helped in the neighborhood, clearing away the dirt, bringing water, I drove to Bonn to get medicine." But Mayer is a photographer and at some point he gets the cameras out again. His idea is not to produce more images of rubble or catastrophes, but to tell the stories behind them from the people's point of view.
In the days full of desperation and worries, nobody has the time and nerves to deal with photo motifs. He keeps explaining what he's doing. "It was the case that you didn't really want photographers and reporters there. But I found a good approach and spent many days with people over a period of months, eating, drinking, laughing and crying with them." The result is the photo series "The darkest night", which tells the story of four families from July 15, 2021 to the end of February 2022.
There is the Krämer family - a young couple with four children from Laach. Björn Krämer escapes into the vineyards at night and watches as a house and its occupants are swept away by the water. Her own house has to be demolished after the flood. Kramer's occupational therapy practice in Ahrweiler was also destroyed. To this day, they lead a makeshift life in a holiday home. After fleeing Iraq, the Kurdish Haji family found a new home in Bad Neuenahr. With their severely disabled, wheelchair-bound son Dler and their son Aras, they escape at the last moment when the water seeps into the small ground floor apartment. A year later, the four of them are still living in 20 square meters in one of the tiny houses in the parking lot opposite the swimming pool in Bad Neuenahr.
Arianit and Stefanie Haxhiu-Juchem have fulfilled their dream of owning their own house in the Heppingen development area. They can move in a year before the flood, even if they don't have insurance yet. After the night of the flood, her house was destroyed down to the first floor. Because the savings have been used up, they rebuild everything themselves.
And then there are Mayer's parents, Renate and Rainer, both war children in their 80s. Her house remains almost intact and yet hardly anything in her life is the same as it was. "My father is 82, my mother 80, they can hardly live there anymore. There are no more shops or cafes in the city, there are a few containers where you can buy something and a supermarket. For my parents, that's the one end of the world," says Mayer. His mother suffers two strokes.
Mayer's photos have an unsettling atmosphere, like something from a lost world. "That's also what I felt and saw." Mayer photographs in color, but what he saw through the viewfinder "reflects best in black and white." The apocalyptic mood of the night of the catastrophe is still present in the more recent pictures, as is the desperation of the people. "Everyone was in shock at first, the mud had to be removed, it had to be cleaned up. The screed had to be removed, the plaster removed. Everything had to dry in the winter." To this day, the gratitude for the overwhelming help is great. But in the meantime there is a lack of building permits and many also lack money. "People are really battered," observes Mayer. The feeling spreads that one is being forgotten.
Anyone driving through the towns on the Ahr today will be confronted with flood damage everywhere. The people use the makeshift bridges that the Federal Agency for Technical Relief had built. Some streets have been renovated, others are still very provisional. Many shops are still closed, entire streets are dominated by construction work. "There are places like Laach where almost nothing happened. Every third or fourth house is missing," says Mayer. "When I took photos there with the drone, I didn't know where I was. And I know every centimeter there."
Many fear that it could take up to ten years before the damage is really repaired. "The hopelessness and fear may be greater than ever." If it rains for more than two hours today, people will be worried. "Then a depressed mood spreads and this fear is now associated with the river. We were proud of the narrow valley and that everything was built so close to the water." Mayer sees things differently today.
"Today, when I see these winding streets and the houses along the Ahr, where people want to go again, I get scared." The changes caused by climate change have become concrete on the Ahr. Mayer can understand the people who are attached to their homeland. He also hopes that they will stay in the Ahr valley. "But I find it brave to go back to the same spot." The experiences from the "darkest night" are too present for him and the expert opinions too clear. "A hundred-year flood doesn't mean that it only comes every hundred years. It can happen tomorrow, in 10 years or in 50." For him, the flood he experienced is not a singular event, just as the stories of the people in his photos are not individual fates. "The change in climate makes it clear that this will happen again."
