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Accepted Paper:
Life in the underwater house. Studying the coral reef ecosystem in the space age.
Eike-Christian Heine
(University of the Bundeswehr Munich)
In an age of big science, the German marine ethologist and documentary filmmaker Hans Fricke (*1941) represents a small science approach. His TV documentary about his habitat Neritika in the Red Sea (1978) re-iterated Space Age pathos while ultimately remaining skeptical of underwater colonization.
Paper long abstract:
In 1978, the German marine ethologist and documentary filmmaker Hans Fricke (*1941) built an underwater habitat at a depth of 11 meters in the Red Sea. He used it to study the coral reef ecosystem and to produce a documentary for German television. Fricke presented his foray "into the watery mantle of our planet" in the context of the space age. As with the French documentary filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, the conquest of "inner space" in analogy to "outer space" formed the central frame of meaning. Unlike Cousteau, however, and unlike manned space flight, Fricke is not an example of large-scale Cold War exploration. In an age of big science, he represents a small-science approach. While Cousteau dreams of "Homo Aquaticus" (Helen Rozwadowski), Fricke is ultimately more skeptical about human adaptation to the ocaen. At the end of his TV documentary, the human divers return to the surface while the plants and animals of the reef colonize the habitat. Fricke concludes that technology allows us to stay in the submarine for long periods of time, but ultimately we humans remain strangers in the extreme nature of the underwater world.