Illustrator and comic book artist Calle Claus portrays Casablanca – the largest city in Morocco. At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, he travels to Morocco in October 2013 as part of the “Comic Transfer” project. Claus’ “Casablanca” comprises five pages, 22 panels. A flying visit in three brief episodes: a walk through the old city, a taxi ride, then impressions, the diversity around the mosque and along the seaside promenade.
Calle Claus, German cartoonist and text writer, illustrator and radio play author, also teaches at various universities and art schools as a lecturer for drawing, character design and storytelling.
The coastal settlement of Anfa was a Berber trading place dating back to at least the 8th century. In 1575, Portuguese colonizers called the city ‘Casa Branca’ or ‘White House’. Spanish traders established ‘Casablanca’ in the 19th century. Between 1906 and 1956, Morocco was exploited as a colony under the French. Today, ‘Casa’ as the locals call it, is Morocco’s most important port and industrial center. More than three million people live here. In 1993, the fifth largest mosque in the world was completed and dedicated to Hassan II.
If you want to explore Casablanca on your own, you can take a taxi. The small, red ‘petit taxis’ are designed to carry a maximum of 3 passengers and travel short distances within the city. The white ‘grand taxi’ can accommodate up to six passengers and is essentially for longer stretches, for instance to take you to hotspots in the area.
“Casablanca”, a romantic drama, was filmed in 1942, only in Hollywood; the Casablanca Conference, a meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill, was held in 1943. The film reviews complained that the milieu and plot of the film (agents, Allies, diplomats, Nazis) were really more suited to the port city of Tangier in northern Morocco than to Casablanca. A restaurant – Rick’s Café – was opened in 2004 and was designed to recreate the film set.
Stefan Mesch on "Casablanca"
I am happy to see that at no point does Claus play the Morocco expert: His sentence – ‘Around the mosque and its inner courtyard, life is lively and relaxed' – lays his cards on the table, in all the hackneyed phrases. This is not the eye of an insider, a know-all."
