In his 1899 novel “Heart of Darkness,” the British-Polish writer Joseph Conrad took his main character Marlow on a hellish journey up a river in the Belgian Congo. Marlow’s mission was to locate Kurtz, an ivory trader who had lost all moral sense but was worshipped by local tribes. He manages to find Kurtz, who is already dying. His final words illustrate what surrounds him: “The horror, the horror…”

In the 1979 film Apocalypse Now, American director Francis Ford Coppola moves Conrad’s story to the Vietnam War, where again the methods of the derailed Kurtz are considered “unsound”. After a hair-raising journey, Coppola’s protagonist manages to track down Kurtz, who is surrounded by corpses and whose last words are once again “The horror, the horror…”

In both book and film, the journey along a river towards a place of horror appear as a metaphor for a voyage through the dark depths of the human mind, specifically with respect to the collapse of morality.

Like Congo and Vietnam, Germany is also a country of rivers. The Liederbach flows in the state of Hessen and has its source near Königstein, a village on the slopes of the Taunus mountains. It flows towards Höchst, a suburb of Frankfurt, where it finds its end in the Main, the river that passes through the city. Just as Conrad and Coppola used rivers as metaphors for moral decay, the Liederbach became a backdrop for a tragedy that similarly echoes pitch black themes.

As a river, the Liederbach is of little significance. It’s never wider than two meters and even in the winter not more than forty centimeters deep. However, “The Horror” occurring near the end of it in Höchst during 1998, with the gruesome murder of the thirteen-year-old Tristan Brübach, most definitely evokes associations with Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now. Not only because of the gruesome details concerning the modus operandi of the murderer, but also because this perpetrator has remained at large up to this day. For such reasons, this tragedy left dark emotional traces in the memory of the locals, as projected metaphorically on the river and its surroundings.

Over the last two years, the Dutch photographer Peter Edel has lived near the Liederbach and, during the winters, travelled along it in search of these traces. He recognised them from the sources of the river in the Taunus mountains and the downstream landscapes, to the urban area where the child’s murder occurred.

However, Edel’s journey became more than a physical expedition. It was also a trip back in time, an aspect that he translated in his approach to photography specific to this project. He employed techniques ranging from the use of a lens designed in 1841 and references to Pictorialism (an impressionistic movement within photography at the end of the 19th century), to the latest digital technology available to photographers. Edel used this blend of historical and modern photography to evoke the haunting atmosphere of the Liederbach’s landscape, capturing the lingering traces of horror that still permeate the scenery.

After a solo exhibition at Familie Montez in Frankfurt in 2024, the Suzanne Biederberg presents Peter Edel’s series The Complicit River for the first time in The Netherlands.

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