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The New German Migrant Crisis: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen
Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2015 novel Gehen, ging, gegangen deals with a topic of “immediate
relevance” to a German readership, the current migrant crisis in Europe, “brandaktuell” as the
FAZ reviewer Friedmar Apel put it. The title alludes to the difficulties migrants face in learning a
new and difficult language and, by extension, surviving in a new country with unfamiliar laws
and customs. While the principle parts of the irregular verb “to go” exemplify this learning
difficulty, their meaning carries the additional allusion to the journey the migrants have faced
and will face in their flight from untenable conditions at home. What I wish to address here,
however, is not the migrant crisis as presented in the novel per se, but rather what would make
one want to pick up a work of fiction and read about something at length that is nearly
inescapable in the daily media and one’s daily life. What does one gain from Erpenbeck’s novel
that is missing from journalistic sources or protesters or even talk shows, which then makes the
extra time and effort spent worthwhile? Can this or any novel help reader/citizens better
understand a current social crisis or better decide among various options which may be the
most appropriate action to take in response? The multiple meanings of the title - and the
freedom we have to discover and play with them - present one answer, the one I wish to pursue:
the opportunity to reflect and gain insight on a social issue through pleasure, that thing which
aesthetics can bring a topic that is usually presented without it.
Last year, when I learned that Jenny Erpenbeck had published a new novel, I was quite excited
to hear it, as I had found the earlier novels Heimsuchung and Aller Tage Abend beautifully
constructed and conceived. I went online and found a review in the FAZ of her latest, the
“Tatsachenroman” (factual novel) Gehen, ging, gegangen: retired Classics professor takes up
the cause of African migrants and becomes their advocate. Hm. “Tatsachenroman.” Well, after
the two historically-based but highly imaginative and philosophically reflective earlier novels, the
characterization of the new one as a “factual novel” dampened my enthusiasm. Sure, the work
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was on the short list for the 2015 German Book Prize, but an Amazon.de review questioned
whether this “Tatsachenroman” should even be considered literature: “If this book by this author
is being seriously considered as a favorite for the German Book Prize, then German literature in
the 21st century is dead.”1 Perhaps, or the reviewer is just anti-migrant. And then, there was the
retired professor. Not only would the book likely add to the information overload about the
migrant crisis I already felt subject to but might also present me with a character not unlike the
one I see every morning in the mirror, myself, a recently retired professor in the humanities. I
like to choose fiction that takes me where I can learn something new.
But I did read this novel to the end, a couple times now, and want today to explore my
original concerns about its characterization as a “Tatsachenroman” and then ask what one
gains by viewing controversial current events through a literary lens. Indeed, Erpenbeck’s novel
portrays highly contemporary events surrounding the dissolution of an African migrant
encampment on the Oranienplatz in Berlin two years before, the relocation of the migrants to
shelters for the winter, and the extended legal wrangling to decide whether or not they would be
granted asylum, all widely publicized moments in the politicized struggle of this group of
migrants. A highly emotional topic and thus risky endeavor on Erpenbeck’s part. Not a novel of
historical fiction, introducing readers to fascinating, but distant, events and personalities, that
are often of little consequence in their everyday life. Rather, the book confronts German
readers with social and moral issues they wake up to every morning. Various officials explain to
the former Classics professor Dublin II, Italian laws on work and residence permits, the German
policy of “Duldung,” that is, of tolerating migrants until their request for asylum is decided, even
a provision in the law that says a refugee shelter cannot be disbanded if an infectious disease
has broken out there. In all cases we also see how these real informational items change the
lives of the characters in the novel, each of significance in the lives of the readers. It thus 1 All translations mine. “Wenn dieses Buch dieser Schriftstellerin ernsthaft als Favorit für den deutschen Buchpreis gehandelt wurde, dann ist die deutsche Literatur des 21. Jahrhunderts tot.” (Von Glen Runciter am 13. November 2015)
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shares many features of Brecht’s or Grips Theater’s teaching plays (Lehrstücke), which show
the reader what is happening in the world around them and then allow theater-goers or readers
to draw moral conclusions from what they are witnessing and determine what they should do
about it - notwithstanding that Brecht or Grips may have used particular techniques to achieve
that effect or had a desired lesson in mind. And yes, after initial painful descriptions almost
identical with the early days of my retirement, the life of Richard, the main character, begins to
develop in quite remarkable directions.
The Facts
As the author of a Tatsachenroman, Erpenbeck is presenting her readers with actual
controversies around them and then showing how her fictional characters come to grips with
these realities, migrant fears engendered by the totally foreign culture they now inhabit or
German fears engendered by the appearance of large numbers of migrants from Africa and the
Middle East in their midst, that is, unknown people with unknown pasts, unknown beliefs,
unknown customs. Her Tatsachenroman combines real conditions we usually learn only
second-hand from the news with those of individuals we usually never see, presented through
the eyes of an individual deeply invested in Western European cultural traditions. And it allows
for reflection and the development of a subsequent response over time rather than provoke, on
the one hand, immediate knee-jerk ideological rigidity or an emotional outburst, on the other.
The real conditions as presented here are thinly disguised by rather prosaic narrative tools. A
migrant protest is heard on a televised news report, Richard reads of the history of West Africa
in a reference book, France’s current exploitation of Niger for uranium is the topic of a rather
stilted conversation among friends on a walk through the woods, a court-appointed immigration
lawyer explains the intricacies of immigration law to Richard and the totally befuddled Nigerian
migrant Ithemba (301-10), and Berlin Senate officials recite relevant regulations in a migrant
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meeting about future housing (100-03). Every chapter of the novel teaches us about migrant
conditions and German or European regulations.
Along with the chronology of the migrant camp on Berlin’s Oranienplatz, the novel
explains relevant aspects of German and European immigration law, often in such pedantic
detail, especially in juxtaposition to the critical and immediate needs of the migrants, that its use
here as a super-rational impediment to migrant acceptance and integration is hard to dispute.
Such impersonal rules to govern and ensure the integrity of a polity, by which one can
segregate the outsider, are perhaps the ultimate, if not intended, expression of the
Enlightenment Rechtsstaat, something that attracted all these migrants to Europe in the first
place, as victims of war, chaos, and arbitrary justice, but at the same time also something that
often disallows a human response to injustice and delays action on their cases interminably:
“Those, who occupy this country - for only 150 years now it has been called ‘Germany’ - defend
their territory with paragraphs, attack the new arrivals with that super weapon2 time . . .” (102-
03). Erpenbeck’s narrator criticizes the bureaucracy of the Rechtsstaat more directly later: “ . . .
this never-ending stream of human beings, who, having survived a voyage on the high seas, are
now drowning in rivers and seas of documents” (310).3
The scholarly task that Richard sets for himself, namely, to conduct interviews with the
migrants and turn them into a scholarly article or book, is also part of a Western objectivity that
sets itself as superior to and more valid than emotional, personal responses, that is, what one
sees in public rallies from left or right, TV talk shows, on the floor of the Bundestag, or at private
2 The term used here „Wunderwaffe“ is the same one used in Nazi propaganda to describe weapons the Third Reich was purportedly developing that would lead to immediate and total victory. Today, it usually carries ironic implications.3 The all-knowing narrator of Gehen, ging, gegangen remains primarily neutral in telling the story. However, episodes are juxtaposed and observations offered in such a way that the irony of Germans pursuing their daily routines and enjoying an orderly, comfortable, secure life with so many unsettled migrants in their midst cannot be missed. Criticism of the situation is usually left to insights of Richard and his friends, often with Richard in free indirect speech so that it is at times difficult to separate narrative stance from the views of the characters.
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parties. Through this ruse of objectivity he gains access to the migrants, from whom the
external world is prevented entry, the door to the shelter “is always locked, from the inside”
(189). Unsuspecting of any difficulties, Richard appears at the shelter and asks to speak with
the migrants, initially refused by security: “It’s not as easy as that” (55). Even being a professor
is not sufficiently persuasive. Finally, the director is convinced by his explanation: “I’m working
on a research project” (56). And though this impersonal backdrop may evoke our empathy with
the migrants, the characters in the novel do not all evoke our sympathy. Besides, the factual
nature of the novel predisposes readers to believe they are in a value-free environment and
thus still free to draw their own conclusions about actions they might take in their personal lives
after reading it. As Erpenbeck says in her interview with ARD on October 4, 2015, there is a
certain fluidity in the contemporary scene: what Germany and Germans are confronting cannot
be viewed against the past but rather recognize that history is always changing and that our
responses to this crisis should not necessarily perpetuate our past, but allow history to move us
on to new social configurations. “Writing means that one can take one’s time to look at things
in peace. And perhaps this is actually a new phase of history. We never think that even history
can change.“4 She speaks of writing but her comments are equally valid for reading and writing.
The Aesthetic
So what does the “Roman” part of “Tatsachenroman,” in other words, the aesthetic
dimension of fiction, bring to the migrant debate that is missing in other forms of expression, be
they hyper-rational and partisan (public policy papers and legal debates) or hyper-irrational and
inflammatory (internet and street polemics and politically-oriented journalism) or even the
related genre of narrative literary journalism5 most recently exemplified by Navid Kermani’s
compilation of interviews with migrants entering Europe via the island of Lesbos, Einbruch der
4 “Schreiben heißt, dass man sich Zeit nehmen kann, um die Dinge in Ruhe anzuschauen. Und vielleicht ist es tatsächlich ein ganz neuer Anschnitt in der Geschichte. Daran denken wir immer nicht, dass die Geschichte sich auch ändern könnte.“5 I take this term from John C. Hartsock’s Literary Journalism and the Aesthetics of Experience, p. 3.
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Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa?6 If asked to answer that, our Classics
scholar Richard might begin by looking at Cicero’s three-part prescription for classical
rhetoricians, later adopted by the classically educated poets in the High Courtly Period of
German literature, as they provided moral guidance for the state: docere, delectare, movere.
The link to rhetorical speech reveals the possibility of aesthetics in areas with motivational
objectives: talk radio, sermons, and narrative literary journalism, where its inclusion introduces
subversive, culturally critical elements and distinguishes from “objective journalism.7 In the
courtly epic, however, Cicero’s directives resulted in stories that brought pleasure to God and
mortals while teaching life lessons that motivated readers to right ways of thinking and acting
that combined an evolving understanding of both Christian ethics and the refinements of the
French courtly life and chivalry - an aesthetic realized through the craft of storytelling that was
purposeful and sought a desired social impact. The moral guarantor in Gehen, ging, gegangen,
however, is not the Christian God of the Middle Ages, but rather, as I hope to show, an
empathetic cosmopolitanism based on our common humanity and common experiences of
trauma, suffering, and loss. Imbedded in the story are lessons about the nature of our common
humanity and how cultural memory transmits conceptual barriers to embracing commonality
beyond the parochial. Late in the novel, prompted by the appearance of a police line effectively
cutting him and other Germans off from the African migrants in the shelter, Richard muses on
the nature of barriers that distinguish between cultures, languages, skin color, and customs and
concludes that on a universal scale the erection of boundaries between people “is based only
on the absurd misunderstanding that humanity is divided and keeps it from seeing how much
more enduring the life of the planet is compared to the lives of any individuals” (261). I will
elaborate on this cosmopolitan message later. This idea is one prompted by an earlier insight
Richard gleans from the migrant, a nomadic Tuareg he calls “Apollo,” who doesn’t really know 6 First published as article in the October 2, 2015 issue of Der Spiegel and then the unabridged paperback version: Einbruch der Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa. C. H. Beck: München, 2016.7 See Hartsock 4-5.
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what country he is from. “For the first time it occurs to him [Richard] that the Africans really don’t
care about the borders drawn by the European powers. Recently, as he was looking up the
capital cities, he noted the border lines in the atlas, straight as an arrow, but it wasn’t clear to
him until now how lines like that reveal the arbitrariness of it all” (66).8
Or should the critic find some entry to the aesthetic through Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters
from Weimar Classicism, a period so named as it too harkens back to the harmonies and ideals
of Greek antiquity? Richard recites the beginning of Faust, as he nervously listens to African
migrants introduce themselves and their histories at a migrant/community meeting in Kreuzberg,
seeking some reassurance in his insecurity there by the bedrock familiarity of his culture: “I have
alas studied philosophy . . . .” (36-37). In his Letters, Schiller looks to the aesthetic as the
mediating corrective to, and at the same time connective between, the super-rationalism of the
Enlightenment and the super-emotional excesses of the French Revolution, through which we
not only can discover and create an integrated human nature, but are also able to transfer that
integration to the organization of the state, something that frees the individual within society to
make ethical decisions consistent with the dignity of our humanity.9 In such a light, the aesthetic
aspects of Erpenbeck’s novel can free us, on the one hand, from the irrational response of our
emotions to the migrant crisis, visceral and defensive responses to the flood of migrants
overwhelming Europe or even the overly-optimistic “We can do this” empathic, open-door policy
that follows from viewing photographs of a child washed ashore on a Turkish beach. “What’s a
refugee doing with a laptop anyway, the one neighbor thinks. Then it must be one of the men
who deal drugs in the park around the corner, the other neighbor thinks” (39), opinionated
reactions to a migrant screaming that his laptop has been stolen at the community/migrant
8 “Zum ersten Mal kommt ihm der Gedanke, dass die von Europäern gezogenen Grenzen die Afrikaner eigentlich gar nichts angehen. Kürzlich hat er, als er die Hauptstädte gesucht hat, wieder die schnurgeraden Linien im Atlas gesehen, aber erst jetzt wird ihm klar, welche Willkür da sichtbar wird an so einer Linie“ (66)9 One might explore more modern re-conceptions of this idea, for example in Elliott and Turner’s understanding of society not as structure or solidarity but as creation.
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meeting. Or Richard’s impulsive I-can-fix-this gift of €3,000 to fulfill Karon’s dream of purchase
a farm in Ghana (275ff). On the other hand, the aesthetic can temper the super-rationalism of
the Rechtsstaat, where individual cases are decided by rulings of abstract law, unmoved by
exception or compassion to put mercy before justice, the option once available to autocrats and
kings. The rule of law prohibits the migrants from demonstrating against another relocation,
because they have not submitted answers to three questions required by official ordinances: “1)
Who is applying for the demonstration, 2) What is the route, and 3) What is the motto?” (265).
By placing such examples in an aesthetic context, a novel can offer us a place of freedom to
experience, evaluate, and experiment with the immediate social challenges that confront us
within a fictional frame
With his retirement, Richard is starting to live according to Schiller’s ideal, transferring
the aesthetic from the realm of philosophy into his everyday life. He has learned the way to
slice an onion so that it doesn’t slip off the knife while he’s cutting: “there’s an ideal way of doing
everything, in everyday life, at work, in art . . . the art of slicing an onion” (24).10 Widowed and
alone he can live this way, no one is there to criticize or make fun of him for it, as his former
lover used to do. He may, unimpeded, strive to live in harmony with the world around him and
enjoy that life. Within the novel, this new freedom certainly opens him to new learning, for
example, an otherwise unmotivated desire to get to know and assist the migrants.
Nevertheless, Erpenbeck is no Pollyanna in this regard and acknowledges the struggle
between cultivating such an aesthetic harmony and simply reverting to the comfort of routines
determined by the culturally transmitted order. The sense of security they provide are difficult to
abandon, can hinder new learning, and resist change. Richard still writes his shopping lists
according to how the groceries are arranged in the store and the narrator quickly exposes how
10 Richard’s aesthetic experience here also conforms with the properties of Tom Leddy’s “everyday aesthetics,” which he describes as “neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective. They are properties of experienced things, not of physical objects abstracted from our experienced world.” (7)
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enduring such fastidious attention to order and security can be, commenting: “And on his death
bed, he will know in which aisle they stack the beer” (72). The appearance of the migrants in
Richard’s world makes his idea of harmony with a static set of conditions no longer tenable, and
he, like the reader, must make decisions about their routines and cultural practices. Where
Germans used to know what to do on the Oranienplatz: relax on the park benches, have their
lunch or a beer break, rock their baby carriages, feed the sparrows, walk hand-in-hand with their
lovers, now, since the migrants arrived, none of that seems right: “Since the blacks began
camping out on the lawns, those things one used to take for granted, like sitting on a bench, are
no longer taken for granted” (46).11 Yet, as he sits on the park bench observing the migrants
and taking notes, the aesthetic modification of the order Richard has enjoyed also allows him
new insights and allows initial stirrings of interaction and mingling. He delights in perhaps
retitling his essay on the migrants “A Transformation in Sitting.” Although the usual cultural
practices are gone, he sits on the park bench regardless. As he looks at the migrants, a second
title occurs to him: “The Birth of Regardless.” In his aesthetic discovery about slicing onions, he
notes that it makes him feel one with a world outside himself, something that opens him to that
world, in this case, the camping migrants. “Finding pleasure in an order of things,” we are told
about Richard, “something not of his creation but something to be discovered, something apart
from him and precisely for that reason connecting him with those things that grow, fly or float,
something that in fact separates him from many people, but he doesn’t care about that” (25).12
This is the function of the aesthetic here in this Tatsachenroman.
While Richard may be striving toward a Schillerean aesthetic within the novel, the reader
experiences a more conventional aesthetic through the craft of writing itself, namely
Erpenbeck’s story-telling. No news report would afford us the pleasure dramatic irony as here 11 “Das selbstverständliche Sitzen auf einer Parkbank hat durch die schwarzhäutigen Menschen, die auf den Grünflächen hinter den Bänken kampieren, aufgehört, etwas Selbstverständliches zu sein.“ 12 In describing the role of the aesthetic in narrative literary journalism, Hartsock notes that „ . . . the varieties of aesthetic experience do not necessarily have to confirm existing shared (and abstract) values, and therein lies . . . a subversive nature to the genre.” (5)
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where the narrator calls our attention to the hunger strike on the Alexanderplatz while our main
character hurries past without noticing, or when we learn what a reluctant Apollo is withholding
in his answers to Richard’s interview questions (67-68). A sensationalist talk show host would
certainly cite the ransacking of Richard’s home as a sign of what happens when you befriend a
migrant but none would then introduce unresolved doubt and nuance in the viewer’s mind about
the migrant Osarobo’s guilt through a wonderful scene where Richard, amidst wondering if the
break-in had been his own fault by bringing the migrants into his home, surfs the internet,
randomly lands on “Probability” (ironic in its own right), proceeds to click on Schrödinger’s cat
(alive or dead or both?), and then on multiple universes (simultaneity or statistical likelihood?),
all the while wondering if his being away, delivering a paper at an academic conference, was
the cause of the break-in or whether it had saved him from personal harm (318-22). Through
storytelling one can linger in the enjoyment of the storyteller’s craft, fully apart from the serious
matters that elsewhere might elicit only casual interest, self-righteousness, or impersonal
legalism.
The Trope of Visibility
But I want to focus on an aesthetic dimension of greater structural significance for the
novel, one that dominates the narrative, namely the trope of visibility. I believe Erpenbeck’s use
of visibility is central to understanding the value added by the aesthetic to the politically charged
migrant debate and central to unlocking the way to move forward in interpretation. Erpenbeck
employs the trope in remarkably creative ways not only to give the reader pleasure in their
discovery, but also to indicate the interconnectedness and mutuality of the efforts that must be
undertaken if the migrant crisis will be addressed through personal resolve and action.
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Two major narrative moments establish the centrality of “becoming visible” from the
outset.13 The first intrudes into the introduction of Richard as a character, his obsession with the
drowning of a tourist in the lake behind his home that summer, more accurately, with his anxiety
about the moment the body will resurface and become visible again (11). References to the
decomposing corpse suddenly and repeatedly appear in the narrative at unexpected moments,
mimicking the presence of an ongoing fear that continually interrupts the course of our daily
lives. The second appears as a motto on a sign alongside the asylum seekers on the
Alexanderplatz, “We become visible” and underneath for non-English-speakers, “Wir werden
sichtbar” (23). It characterizes the strivings of the migrants throughout the novel to be seen in
the daily life and conscience of everyday Germans. Visibility for the asylum seekers takes the
form of public protest here and later, when the group is scheduled for relocation to Buckow
(101), but becomes more personal for Richard when individuals begin to reveal their personal
histories to him in his interviews, and becomes more intimate when they begin visiting him, and
culminates when they are even living with him in his home.
13 A good example of “becoming visible” in the visual arts is found in the art of California painter, Ramiro Gomez. Here, No Splash (2013), Gomez’ version of David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967), which reveals the domestic workers who labor behind the scenes to enable the southern Californian life of the well-to-do, however vacant that life might be.
A Bigger Splash, Hockney (1967) No Splash, Gomez (2013)
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The first part of the trope deals with Richard’s willingness and ability to see things
around him, the second, the ability and willingness of the migrants to be seen. Visibility is a
two-way street, a type of epistemology where there are contingencies on both the object and the
subject. The object must come to light, become visible – here, as individuals, through a
willingness to publically expose traits, behaviors, and personal histories - and the subject must
be in a position to see and understand what one is seeing - here, associating at first what one
sees and learns from the migrants with what one superficially knows and later with more
substantive cultural and personal knowledge whereby their sufferings and trauma can be known
and seen deeply empathetically. The success of any interaction between them then depends
on the visibility of one and the ability of the other to see. In this study I wish to focus on
individual actions and decisions that make this possible, rather than broad social forces that
may hinder or alter it, for example the media and governmental regulation.14 Richard first learns
of the migrant hunger strike through the news, but resists an honest response to what he sees,
knowing how manipulative the media can be: he distrusts the sincerity of the reporter and the
validity of the video being shown. In their shelter, the visibility of the migrants is physically
restricted by the supervisors and security guards, few visitors are allowed and the migrants
rarely leave; once granted admission and permission to interview the migrants, Richard is
advised to conduct his interviews there, not outside, not where the migrants will be seen.
Becoming Visible
How do the migrants become visible to Germans? Stories like Gehen, ging gegangen
present us with behavior and events where migrants become recognizable as individuals,
situations they face as individuals and where readers may sympathize with, disapprove of, and
make moral judgments about the migrants in disinterested ways, all of which serves as a
14 In her study of Virginia Woolf, Claudia Olk takes a similar approach: “This study will not be concerned with vision as a vehicle of the dominant social ideology or a subversive articulation of competing discourses, but with vision and its potentialities as a metaphor, a process, and a formal and structural means of creating narrative reality and perceptual cognition in literature” (7).
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background or playground and prepares us to act and judge when reader/citizens confront
similar individuals, events, and histories in their own lives. This phenomenon or function of
literature occurs within Gehen, ging, gegangen repeatedly, as Richard gets to know the African
migrants as a group during the hunger strike and as individuals in the shelter. It is a
contemporary epistemic journey from no knowledge, to mediated knowledge, to direct
knowledge gained through his personal experience of people and events.
From a passive form of visibility in the German consciousness as seen in their camp on
the Oranienplatz, the migrants seek active visibility in the German conscience with their hunger
strike on the Alexanderplatz: “We become visible.” The well-intentioned and sympathetic
reporter, however, cannot convince the migrants to give up their names. Too much visibility, it
seems - the visibility of individuality - can be risky. And indeed, as we learn later, the authorities
do not treat these migrants from Africa via Libya via Italy via Switzerland as a group, but as
individual cases - on the one hand, legitimately so as one would expect from any Rechtsstaat,
but on the other, dealing with an individual is a strategy by which the state can take action.
Richard muses: “in terms of physics, to break a group into individual cases is surely a smart
thing to do” (171) – and later when the migrants are told to vacate their shelter in Berlin, he also
realizes how the visibility of individuals serves the interests of the state: “Richard had not
understood until now why the migrants had to provide their names before the Senate would sign
the [relocation] agreement. How can you enter someone’s name on an eviction list, unless you
know what it is?” (257-58). Richard notes the irony or paradox of the migrant strategy of limited
visibility when he learns on the evening news that the strike had ended, the hunger-strikers
removed from the Alexanderplatz, the migrants again invisible, the “We become visible” sign in
some trash can: “Too bad, he thought. He had found the idea of becoming visible by not
revealing your name publicly, quite amusing” (31). This bit of irony, however, may have peeked
his interest about the whereabouts of these particular migrants and, seeking and finding
information that they are camped out on Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg, he decides to attend a
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community/migrant meeting scheduled there. Richard sees the migrants again, personally this
time, but in a clever narrative parallel to the boldness and anxiety of the hunger strikers, that is
the desire to become visible and exposed while remaining invisible and safe, Richard, fearful he
will be unmasked as an outsider and asked to leave, decides to remain silent when it’s his turn
to introduce himself (37). In fact, he ironically leaves the room and escapes when the
opportunity presents itself in order to keep his identity and name secret and, like the hungers
strikers, becomes invisible again. Visibility in unfamiliar surroundings is risky for anyone, here
psychologically for Richard rather than politically.
Mutual visibility, however, does finally occur after the dissolution and relocation of the
Oranienplatz camp to a shelter near Richard’s home. Richard cloaks his personal visibility by
appearing there in the familiar and safe role of impersonal observer, a researcher conducting
interviews with the migrants for a book project (notably, as did Erpenbeck for this book project).
Of the migrants, most agree to interviews, becoming individuals with personal characteristics
and histories, some, as Apollo and Osarobo, skeptical and reluctant to divulge much about
themselves (67, 121), others, as Awad (Tristan), over-eager, claiming one should hide nothing if
one seeks acceptance in a country or with a person (73). In the interviews, the migrants
become individuals with names and personal histories, almost exclusively ones of loss and
trauma: deprivation as children; the experience of war, violence, terrorism; loss of parents and
loved ones; flight from one’s home, dependency on unscrupulous traffickers; dangerous
crossings of the Mediterranean, witnesses to further death by drownings; humiliating and
unpredictable lives in refugee camps; and finally arrival in Germany – these narratives, a part of
the education Richard as well as Erpenbeck’s readers receive through the mediation of her
novel. The visibility of the migrants appears in increasingly intimate spheres for Richard, until
they literally become part of his daily life. What began with Richard not noticing their presence
as he walked across the Alexanderplatz, was first mediated by news reports, became a fleeting
encounter at the community-migrant meeting in Kreuzberg, took shape in brief interviews in the
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neighborhood shelter, then in a café nearby, then on the evening where “the thin one with the
broom” (Karon) entered Richard’s home, telling his story, cleaning the hallway, collecting dirt on
the carpet, leaning his broom up against the bookshelf reserved for “German Classics,” and
sweeping the staircase leading up to Richard’s guestroom - all in Richard’s fantasy and
conscience (135-45), progressed to where Richard is inviting selected migrants to his home for
dinner and distraction (Apollo, piano player [Osarobo] and Rufu 173), and finally ended where
he decides to offer room in his house for twelve of the evicted migrants facing imminent
deportation (326ff.).
The Ability to See
A key to the epistemic journey in the novel, marked by the stages in Richard’s ability to
actually see what is visible to him, is offered to readers through a misunderstanding. In telling
Richard: “They have to find something to do with all their free time,” the attractive Ethiopian
German teacher at the shelter is simply explaining to Richard why the migrants come to class at
all. But the German original: “Ihre Zeit muss mit irgendetwas gefüllt sein,” is ambiguous and
Richard immediately, wishfully, and mistakenly takes the German third-person plural pronoun
(they) for the like-sounding formal (you), believing that the young woman may be flirting with
him, inviting him to spend his free time teaching alongside her: “You have to do something with
all your free time.” Embarrassed for himself, Richard reflects on the nature of communication
and misunderstanding: “Basically, if one wants to understand what someone means or says,
one already has to know what someone means or says” (94-95).15 The insight explains how
Richard has been trying to relate to the migrants from the beginning, how they have become
visible, understandable to him.
Martha Nussbaum contends in Cultivating Humanity that those wishing to advance
beyond parochial identities and to embrace world citizenship must abandon attempts to
15 “Wenn man verstehen will, was einer meint oder sagt, muss man im Grunde das, was er meint oder sagt, immer schon wissen.” (94-95)
16
understand the other through what they already know and instead put themselves in the shoes
of the other. This transformative change of perspective is particularly difficult in that “we always
bring ourselves and our own judgments to the encounter . . . we inevitably will not merely
identify; we will also judge [their stories] in the light of our own goals and aspirations” (11). And
indeed, we make our goals and aspirations theirs as well. I choose Nussbaum as a reference
not arbitrarily, for she focuses on the lessons we moderns can learn from ancient Greek and
Roman philosophy and literature, the specialty of our main character, in opening ourselves to
others. Understandably, Richard first relates the unknown things he sees and hears to the
Western European cultural base that has defined his life.
Richard’s journey to the kind of knowledge and understanding of the African migrants
that Nussbaum advocates begins from a state of ignorance. Hurrying to make his train, he
walks past the hunger strikers on the Alexanderplatz without seeing them at all, not unlike the
vast majority of others around him that afternoon (23). First awareness of the African hunger
strikers comes to him when he watches the news that evening, knowledge of his non-immediate
surroundings entering his life through the mediation of television journalism, the sign We
become visible in the background. So why hadn’t he seen them? Although his first reaction to
the hunger strike, as with all the mediated suffering that television brings into his home from all
corners of the world, is defensive – Richard is not going to stop eating just because they have
stopped eating; he starved as a child at the end of WWII and he doesn’t need to experience that
again – the sign and what it means troubles him. He is intrigued by the curious paradox of
seeking visibility while remaining anonymous and it reminds him of a similar event in the
Odyssey: to escape captivity Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is “No one.”16 Prompted by
his curiosity and reassured by the classical analogy, he takes the first active step to see the
16 see also p. 73 where Awad (Tristan) tells him that migrants must be totally honest and open if they expect to be accepted in a place. Richard thinks about Nobody Odysseus and his escape.
17
migrants in person on their own grounds, the migrant camp on the Oranienplatz, not far away
(43).
The process of seeing, of knowing the other, the migrant, begins for Richard in a non-
verbal realm. He first notes individuals through differences in their physical characteristics (the
tall one, the one wearing sneakers) or behavior (the one who rides a bike, the one with the
broom), things he recognizes, can identify with, remember. As further memory aid he begins to
give the migrants nicknames: an especially handsome African becomes Apollo (66); a
particularly powerful, intemperate one, “the Hurler of Thunderbolts,” Zeus (“der
Blitzeschleuderer" 98); the Ethiopian German instructor in the shelter becomes Astraia, the
virgin-goddess of justice (96); the one wearing golden tennis shoes becomes Hermes, an
association with the wing-footed Greek god, also known as the god of transitions and
boundaries (i.e. migrants?) (44). Or is it with the shoe manufacturer? As Richard moves from
simple observation to recording their personal lives via interviews, his nicknaming continues. A
migrant from room 2020 introduces himself as Awad, but upon learning that his mother died with
his childbirth Richard thinks of Blanscheflur’s death at Tristan’s birth (75). The narrator
explains: “Richard finds it difficult to remember the strange names of the Africans and so when
he writes up his notes in the evening he changes Awad to Tristan, and the young man from the
day before yesterday becomes Apollo. That way he recognizes them later“ (84).17 And to justify
or explain his growing sympathy for the migrants he recalls that Goethe’s Iphigenia was also an
emigrant, on Tauris (82). When Osarobo tells him all he wants to do is work, but is not allowed
to, Richard “thinks about how Mozart’s Tamino was tested and at every door he tries to open
he’s prevented from going forward: Back!” (125).18 In some ways a paradigmatic educated
middle class German with firmly embedded daily routines and a career where he taught and
explicated German and Western European culture reaching back to the classics, things that 17 “Es fällt Richard schwer, sich die fremden Namen der Afrikaner zu merken, und so verwandelt er, als er abends seine Notizen aufschreibt, Awad in Tristan, und den Jungen von vorgestern in Apoll.” (84)18 “Richard denkt daran, wie Mozarts Tamino geprüft wird, und ihn bei jeder Tür, die er öffnen will, eine Stimme vom Weitergehen abhält: Zurück!“ (125)
18
open seemingly unbridgeable gaps between him and the migrants culturally, Richard uses his
vast knowledge of Greek mythology, German medieval and Classical literature to gain initial
access to the individual persons of the migrants, personalizing them by giving them temporary
identities as Greek or German heroes. Literary texts not only provide examples of similar
behavior, personality traits, and personal histories but also enable Richard to begin to
distinguish and remember individual migrants from an impersonal grouping.
Richard’s next step is at once a bold and a careful one: interaction with individual
migrants by conducting personal interviews for a book project. He begins to see these lives
almost in spite of himself. The scholarly approach is a safe, impersonal way to get to know
another human being, whereby Richard as researcher can almost disappear from the process,
much as he chose to do at that first encounter in the Kreuzberg community meeting. Richard
constructs a list of questions he will ask them, as any field researcher would do to ensure
scholarly credibility in the gathering and interpretation of data (52). Many of the questions,
however, reveal the cultural bias we had seen earlier, a curious mixture of things typically part of
life in Europe and stereotypes of a more primitive African culture, e.g. where did your parents
meet, what did the house look like you grew up in, did you have a television, any pets, did you
attend school, etc. All this leads to an embarrassingly insensitive adherence to protocol when it
becomes contextually fully inappropriate. After learning that Rashid (the Hurler of Thunderbolts)
and Zair almost drowned on their crossing from Libya to Lampedusa, he still asks what their
favorite hiding place was as children (61). The Libyan war and the death of his father have so
traumatized Awad (Tristan) that he is beset with splitting headaches after relating these things
during his interview, but “the elderly gentleman, who is very polite, but maybe also crazy”
nevertheless asks him what he has packed to take to the new shelter (165).
The migrants become more visible to Richard through their stories, stories that teach
him things he records in his notebook at night (docere), but which also allow him to see the
migrants more intimately, something powerful enough to motivate him to action (movere). He
19
leaves behind the impersonality of scholarly research and begins to actively assist the migrants
with their German, with their legal affairs, and with access to a better life in Germany. By his
doing so is evidence of a shift from his viewing the migrants as figures in the news or products
of textbook histories but individuals he knows and must interact with in an actual, purposeful,
and ethical way. Although his initial actions may be cumbersome, something I will elaborate on
later, he, for example, brings Osarobo home with him to fulfill his dream of one day playing the
piano. He invites Italian-speaking Rufu, who has loaned him €20 in the grocery store, to dinner
and to read The Divine Comedy in his library in the original, he accompanies Karon to the local
precinct to correct his passport picture, explains to Ithemba what the designation “tolerance”
means at the migrant attorney’s office. His intervention, prompted by his sharpened ability to
see, intensifies to where, after many of his new migrant acquaintances have been evicted from
the shelter in Berlin, he agrees to take twelve into his home and provide them shelter there
(330ff).
I would like to return now to the second initial and central metaphor of visibility and
invisibility in the novel: the drowning of the swimmer in the lake behind Richard’s house. The
body never resurfaces but remains ever-present in Richard’s mind, the trauma of the event and
its aftermath upsetting the calm and beauty of a view he has always enjoyed, always just below
the surface throughout the novel: “Richard really has to guard against going mad. Maybe he’ll
feel better once the dead man is finally found” (17)19 or “He has a view of the lake from his desk.
The lake is beautiful, as in all other summers, but that’s not the final word this summer. So long
as the dead man isn’t found and taken away, the lake will belong to him” (17-18).20 Like a bad
memory it can be sparked into consciousness by the most innocent moments of everyday life.
Richard comes upon a bin of goggles while shopping (31); the swimmer had been wearing
19 “Richard muss wirklich aufpassen, dass er nicht irre wird. Vielleicht wird es ihm besser gehen, wenn der Tote endlich gefunden ist.“ (17)20 „Er kann von seinem Schreibtisch aus auf den See sehen. Schön sit der See, so wie in den anderen Sommern, aber damit ist es in diesem Sommer nicht nicht getan. Der See gehört, solange der Tote nicht gefunden und weggebracht ist, diesem Toten.“ (17-18)
20
goggles (17). Or it can reappear prompted by nothing at all. While Richard notes what days the
migrants will come to his home that week, memory of the dead man suddenly interrupts his
thoughts: “The dead man is still in the lake, if he is not fully decomposed by now” (174).
The circumstances of the drowning induce its translation into a metaphor for the lingering effects
of traumatic rise of Nazism in Germany’s political past: others, in boats nearby, not
understanding the gravity of the situation or perhaps not wanting to be pulled under too, simply
watched and did nothing to prevent the drowning, and in the investigation afterward did not
come forward, remain unidentified onlookers (12).21 Additionally, one can sense a hint of
Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” in Richard’s criticism of the head of the local angler’s club
constantly referring to the fact that the drowned man was wearing goggles. “Googles! As if this
detail was the hardest thing to comprehend about the drowning” (17).22
To explore this metaphor further let me refer to David Kim’s thesis in a new book
manuscript, Parables for World Citizenship, which argues that several contemporary German
novels, namely Hans Christoph Buch’s Rede des toten Kolumbus am Tag des Jüngsten
Gerichts, Michael Krüger’s Himmelfarb, and W.G. Sebald’s Die Ringe des Saturn, have
explored a path to world citizenship for post-unification Germans through the commonality of
trauma, both personal and historical-cultural, that they share with others who have undergone
loss and suffering. Kim shows that the melancholy experienced by characters in the aftermath
of loss in these novels, however, does not, as in Freud’s definition of the pathology, prevent
them from interacting creatively with their contemporary surroundings. On the contrary, the
experience of personal and cultural loss and trauma enables a creative turn to empathy with the
commonalities among humans, regardless of cultural background, and to a sense of world
citizenship. Gehen, ging, gegangen can be added to Kim’s list of exemplary novels, with one 21 the reaction of the boaters, at once not seeing the extremity of the drowning man and then not wanting to be seen themselves, not wanting to be involved with the trauma, parallels Richard’s initial role in the other major visibility image in the novel: he fails to see the hunger strikers on the Alexanderplatz and later flees the migrant meeting in the Kreuzberg schoolhouse for fear of having to give his name.22 „Mit einer Taucherbrille! Als sei gerade dieses Detail das am schwesten zu ertragende an dem Sterben des Schwimmers . . . .“ (17)
21
caveat. Where Kim’s analysis deals with a propositional path to world citizenship and German
solidarity with suffering and oppressed peoples, one that is imagined through historical memory
and fantasy between the covers of early 90’s novels, Erpenbeck’s Tatsachenroman written
twenty years later deals with current events. The immediacy in time and place means that
European readers can act on their responses to a work where a heightened sense of trauma in
their own cultural history can lead to a commitment to world citizenship through a commonality
and empathy with migrants suffering loss and trauma, people living in their own backyard.23
Specifically, Kim writes of the historical traumas of Colonialism, Nazism, and Soviet
Communism, each the result of hyper-rationalism and a centralizing power to control and
eliminate foreign and related threats to the existence and health of the in-group: the Eurocentric
righteousness of Colonialism and the subjugation of indigenous peoples for its own benefit and
the legalization of atrocity and mass incarceration and killings under Hitler and Stalin. That the
Colonial, the National Socialist, and the Communist are determinant in Gehen, ging, gegangen
and form a historical continuum can be seen in the mention of an architectural palimpsest,
where, in considering that the Oranienplatz, the site of the migrant camp, was constructed
during colonial times, the narrator notes that on many old GDR buildings one can see faded
inscribed lettering indicating that here “colonial wares” were sold above a cardboard sign in a
window indicating a “Fruit, Vegetables and Potatoes” shop, a state-run chain during GDR times,
all pockmarked up and down with shrapnel damage from WWII (49).
Erpenbeck’s main character, as the author herself, grew up in East Germany and thus
the places, objects and people he encounters only 25 years after unification regularly elicit
memories of a former, lost life: shelter furniture salvaged from GDR schools, “OK” signaling the
same access as Wsjo w porjadkje had done when he showed his papers at Russian control
points in the past (58), buying his groceries at what he knew to be a “self-service mart” instead
23 As Nussbaum points out, the ability to feel compassion throughout the whole of Western humanistic tradition includes “the sense of one’s own vulnerability to misfortune. . . . Compassion, so understood, promotes an accurate awareness of our common vulnerability” (91).
22
of a “supermarket,” living on a street once named after the communist martyr to National
Socialism, Ernst Thälmann, but now cleansed of that past. These GDR memories, however,
are related without romanticism - no “Ostalgie” here – and without condemnation – no Stasi, no
shortage of consumer goods. Thus, the memory of a lost life in the GDR resembles the
melancholy of indefinite, unfocused loss that Kim speaks of, without a clear sense of trauma. In
many respects, what Erpenbeck relates in her ARD interview regarding the lesson of social
change can be applied to her use of all the references to the GDR in her novel, a simple
transition from one historical period to the next: “Perhaps we are entering a completely new
historical period. We never think about that happening, that history can change. We always
think it remains the same.” That the people, values, and traditions that hold sway over a certain
piece of geographical space are never fixed characteristics and change with time, and are most
clearly reflected in alterations and repurposing of the built environment of their civilization is the
core idea of her 2007 novel Heimsuchung.
The traumatic elements of the other two historical German epochs, however, are
presented more explicitly. Especially in the first sections of the novel one finds information
about the German colonies (a recitation of facts not uncommon in this Tatsachenroman) and
how Richard experienced their legacy. As part of his desire to understand the situation of the
African migrants, Richard picks up a reference book in his personal library and reads how Adolf
Lüderitz signed an agreement with a local chieftain in the 1880’s, exchanging guns for land, and
how German political posturing against England led Bismarck to protect Lüderitz’s private
interest there and establish a colony (53). Of significance for the value added by the aesthetic
here are several narrative comments on Richard’s reading. First, at the same time he learns
about Lüderitz, the connection is made to the present: the Berlin Senate is signing an
agreement with the African migrants to vacate the Oranienplatz and move them to designated
winter shelters elsewhere in the city. Second, he shakes his head in dismay at the colonial
23
mentality of amassing capital gain at the expense of the locals and remembers from his
classical education Walther von der Vogelweide’s Reichsspruch I, where head in hand, the poet
similarly laments that honorable action, wealth, and God’s blessing can never occupy the same
space at one time. And finally, he asks himself what good is head-shaking disapproval in the
solitude of his study? He can no longer even communicate the lessons he is learning to
students. The questionable value of obtaining knowledge, understanding it, relating it to one’s
life, and choosing an appropriate response is beautifully depicted in a few images on one page
of the novel. How to reestablish that value, of course, prompts a new response from Richard:
his active intervention in the plight of the migrants.24
The legacy of Colonialism is apparent in Richard’s memories of his childhood in the
GDR and in some of the language used to refer to the Africans: a book in his library from his
student years Negro Literature (33-35), a memory of Hatschi Bratschi’s Hot-air Balloon being
read to him as a child with its images of cannibals with bones in their hair, a reference to an
African at the community-migrant meeting as a “poor black devil” (“armen schwarzen Teufel”
39), and another at the shelter to the “blackies“ (“Schwarzi” 121). When Karon tells him the
Ghanaian king must first approve Richard’s purchase of a farm there for his family, Richard
imagines him to be “a chieftain with a spear in his hand and clanging ankle bracelets” (278).
But while remnants of colonialism are still with him, as they are on the fading paint of “Colonial
Wares” on the side of the building, Richard has learned to be critical: to shake his head on
reading about Lüderitz, to know that “Negro Literature” is no longer PC, to note that new
editions of Hatschi Batschi no longer contain references to cannibals, to think that Karon’s king
must really be wearing the soccer jersey of Barcelona if he has any real power, and, most
clearly, to link contemporary German bureaucracy with colonial bureaucracy as a tool of
oppression: “A few days ago he had seen the term ‘bureaucratic geometry’ used in the book of 24 Richard’s commitment to making his knowledge relevant, that is acting on his knowledge and insights, adds a motivational role to the significance Nussbaum assigns to Classical knowledge and the subsequent understanding that the arts in general provide. See p. 85ff.
24
a historian about the effects of colonialization. The colonized peoples were choked to death on
bureaucracy. Not the most unrefined strategy to prevent them from taking political action”
(64).25 Thus, like the dead man in the lake, present but below the surface, colonial remnants are
still there but buried and obscure. As Richard seeks them out and uncovers them, he is able to
deal with them critically and incorporate a newly won understanding of the exploitation and
prejudice into his views of the African migrants.
Gehen, ging, gegangen as a Lehrstück can also be seen in Richard’s discussion about
the legacy of colonialism on a walk with his friends: “And as they stroll past pine trees and
oaks . . . Richard tells to his friends Detlef and Sylvia, who probably don’t even know where
Niger is, about the French company Areva, that has the [uranium] mining monopoly and dumps
its waste where the Tuareg [the aboriginal nomads in the region] used the graze their camels”
(181-82).26 Readers, as Detlef and Sylvia, learn in a few pages about the continuing
exploitation of the region, about the Tuareg insurgency against the French puppet government,
about the subsequent massacre, and how the nuclear plants generating electric power for
France and Germany are dependent on these very exports from Areva. German readers are
also reminded that an innocuous but significant part of their culture is related to this discussion,
however hidden and vague: FC Nürnberg wears jerseys bearing the logo of its sponsor, Areva
(183).
The legacy of the Nazi dictatorship also lies below the surface in the novel, becoming visible
occasionally in narrative allusions or Richard’s thoughts. The trauma and loss of the millions
murdered are still present in Richard’s everyday life, for he sees them and their lost progeny
25 „Bürokratische Geometrie, diesen Begriff hat er vor einigen Tagen in dem Buch eines Historikers über die Auswirkungen des Kolonialismus gelesen. Die Kolonisierten wurden durch Bürokratie erstickt. Gar nicht der ungeschickteste Weg, sie am politischen Handeln zu hindern.“ (64)26 “Und während sie an Kiefern und Eichen vorbeigehen, . . . erzählt Richard seinen Freunden Detlef und Sylvia, die wahrscheinlich nicht einmal wissen, wo genau Niger liegt, vom französischen Staatskonzern Areva, der das Monopol für die Minen hält und seine Müll dorthin kippt, wo die Tuareg bisher ihre Kamleweiden hatten.“ (181-82)
25
haunting the streets and cafes around him: “All those Germans murdered during the so-called
Third Reich still inhabit Germany as ghosts, they and their unborn children and grandchildren all
absent, but still walking the streets beside him on their way to work or friends, sitting invisible in
cafes, taking walks, shopping, visiting parks and theaters. Gehen, ging, gegangen” (274).27
Ostensibly, the distractions of history, ones that eventually lead to buried memories of Nazi
barbarism, comprise the reason why at the first pivotal juncture of the novel Richard does not
see the migrant hunger strike on the Alexanderplatz. As he unknowingly walks past the
migrants, he is thinking about his archeologist friend Peter’s dig nearby and the subterranean
markets that once flourished under the Rotes Rathaus. His mind then jumps to Rzeszów,
Poland, a place he visited as a GDR tourist. Underground passageways there similarly housed
an underground market, which, he then recalls, were also used as a hiding place by Jews
during the Nazi occupation, after which, he recalls, the Nazis found and killed them, just like, he
then recalls, refocusing on his current surroundings, the Nazis did by flooding subway tunnels
near the Alexanderplatz to punish certain Berliners who were fleeing rather than fighting the
Soviet Army to the last man, woman, and child. Later, on his way home, he is distracted by the
TV tower and the Jupiter Fountain, places from his childhood, days full of the promise of
socialism, a communal or communist culture now lost. History is connecting with history upon
history and with reflections of personal loss, all conspiring to prevent Richard from seeing the
hunger strikers or their sign, “We become visible” (19-22). Peter, who has spent a career
unearthing things from the past, later tells Richard about finding a statue from the Degenerate
Art Exhibit in 1937 at the medieval dig on the Alexanderplatz - things occasionally get lumped
together. Richard muses silently that “the earth is rather like a garbage dump, different epochs
fall on top of one another in the dark, . . . and progress occurs only when those walking on the
27 “ . . . „dass all diejenigen Deutschen, die während des sogenannten Dritten Reiches umgebracht wurden, Deutschland als Geister immer bewohnen, all die Fehlenden und auch deren ungeborene Kinder und Kindeskinder gehen, . . . neben ihm auf der Strasse, sind unterwegs zur Arbeit oder zu Freunden, sitzen unsichtbar in den Cafés, spazieren, kaufen ein, besuchen Parks und Theater. Gegen ging, gegangen.“ (274)
26
earth know absolutely nothing about it” (30).28 This assessment also reflects his fear about the
dead body suddenly resurfacing behind his home. Better that the event and its effects remain
invisible, be kept secret so he and others can enjoy themselves “Richard hasn’t ever told an
innocent tourist anything about the accident, why do it, why ruin someone’s day, when all they
want to do is enjoy it” (11).29 This sentiment loops into the narrative again when Richard
mentions Hitler to Osarobo:
“He killed people?”
“Yes, he killed people – but only a few,” Richard adds quickly, for he is already sorry that
he almost got carried away and told this young man, who had just fled the slaughter in
Libya, about the slaughter here. No, Richard will never tell this young man that almost
exactly a generation ago now the mass murder of people was invented in Germany. He
is suddenly so ashamed of this, as if something that everyone in Europe is aware of is
his own personal secret, and not to be shared with anyone else in the world. And then
quickly followed by his own hope, no less powerful, by virtue of the innocence of this
young man, to be transported to a Germany before all that, a Germany already and
forever lost at the time he was born. (149-50)30
But Richard’s desire to learn as much as possible about African history, the nature of his own
scholarly career, and the use he makes of history to understand the present belie his view here 28 „die Erde [ist] eher wie eine Müllhalde, die verschiedenen Zeiten fallen im Dunkeln . . . übereinander her . . . und der Fortschritt besteht immer wieder nur darin, dass die, die auf dieser Erde herumgehen, von alldem nichts wissen.“ (30)29 „Richard hat noch nie so einem Ahnungslosen etwas von dem Unglück gesagt, warum auch, warum jemandem, der nur einen schönen Tag haben will, den Tag verdereben?“ (11)30 „He killed people? Ja, er hat Menschen getötet – aber nur ein paar, sagt Richard schnell, denn schon tut es ihm leid,dieses Jungen selbst noch einmal in ein Deutschland dass er sich beinahe dazu hätte hinreißen lassen, diesem Jungen, der gerade vor dem Schlachten in Libyen gefolhen ist, von Schlachten hier zu erzählen. Nein, Richard wird diesem Jungen nie davon erzählen, dass in Deutschland, gerade mal ein Lebensalter entfernt, das fabrikmäßige Ermorden von Menschen erfunden wurde. Er schämt sich dafür plötzluich so sehr, als sei das, was jeder hier in Europa weiß, sein gnaz persönliches, niemandem auf der Welt zumutbares Geheimnis. Und gleich darauf, um nichts weniger heftig, trifft ihn seine eigene Hoffnung, durch die Ahnungslosigkeit vor alldem versetzt zu werden, das schon, und auf immer, verloren war zur Zeit seiner Geburt.“ (149-50)
27
and it ignores the fact that the decomposing corpse and the eventuality of it resurfacing so
obsesses him that he cannot move forward.
As the novel unfolds, we see that relating the Nazi past to the migrant situation is
precisely what allows him and others to progress toward a cosmopolitan ethic. When the police
remove the Africans from the shelter by force, Richard muses that they will be required to pay
the cost of their own arrest, as was the case in former times when Germany was carting another
group away – an implicit condemnation of such a practice (258-59). When Richard and his
friends provide rooms for the migrants after their petitions for asylum are denied, Marion
reminds her husband that at one time you would be sentenced to death for hiding people like
this (333). Marion’s comments persuade her husband to provide space for “Hermes” (333).
Richard finds a place for Ali, a student in Richard’s advanced German class, in his friend Anne’s
home to help with the care of her aging mother, who, after he arrives, is terribly afraid of him.
Anne agrees with Richard that it is due to her Nazi upbringing (229). While the racial inferiority
of Africans, fueled by social Darwinism in the Third Reich and elsewhere, gave way to solidarity
and exchange with politically sympathetic Angola and Mozambique in GDR times, Germans of
an earlier generation perpetuate National Socialist prejudice and fear.
Erpenbeck’s main character views his affiliation with European cultural history in
complex ways but ones which, in the end, reveal connections with the African migrants and their
own cultural histories of trauma and loss. By examining the legacy of his history, he is able to
move toward an empathic cosmopolitan ethic, best represented perhaps by his action at the
very end of the novel to take twelve migrants into his home, merging their daily routines and
lives with his own. He has also arranged for the same to happen with his close friends. Richard
explicitly points to the relationship between confronting and coming to terms with one’s cultural
past and the development of such an ethic, that is, the successful integration of the African
migrants into German society, in his claim (through the narrator) that: “the Africans certainly had
28
no idea who Hitler was, but nevertheless: only if they survive Germany today, will Hitler have
truly lost the war” (64).31 This integrative result will be achieved far more through this
cosmopolitan consciousness and less through matters of fairness and a resolution of the
migrants’ legal status in Germany: Richard, the Classical scholar and former GDR citizen, notes
that “[t]he transition from before to after follows quite different rules than does reward and
punishment” (119).32 As I mentioned earlier in Erpenbeck’s application of the lake metaphor
(340), these memories of loss and past trauma are not dispelled by their critical dissolution.
Rather, the acknowledgement of their continued presence leads to the possibly of a state of
cultural and historical peace and a creative future.
The critical understanding of instances of one’s own historical cultural trauma, “seeing
them,” enables an empathetic understanding of personal trauma of others, a result that should
not to be viewed in chronological or sequential terms, but rather conceptually. Richard moves
beyond the simple recording of the trauma and loss the migrants experienced in their
homelands and on their journey across the Mediterranean and beyond their loss of dignity he
witnesses in the shelter, to take positive action on this information and actively intervene and
assist them in their lives. In a compelling turn at the end of the novel, there emerges a mutuality
in this understanding and empathy when Richard and his German friends reveal to the migrants
they have taken into their homes, personal traumas of their own: the death of Richard’s wife to
alcoholism, their decision to have an abortion while in college and then never being able to have
children afterward, Detlef’s revelation of the terminal illness of his wife, things previously hidden.
“’Understand,’ Zair says. ‘Understand’” (347). Khahil then relates to these disclosures of things
previously unknown to them via the actual and metaphorical “like on the high seas” (348).33
The novel concludes quickly with a narrative confirmation: “Yes, in principle, exactly like on the
31 „Die Afrikaner wussten bestimmt überhaupt nicht, wer Hitler war, aber dennoch: Nur wenn sie Deutschland jetzt überlebten, hatte Hitler den Krieg wirklich verloren.“ (64)32 „die Aufeinanderfolge von Vorher und Nachher [folgt] oft ganz anderen Gesetzen als denen von Belohnung oder Strafe.“ (119)33 „So, wie auf dem Meer?“ (348)
29
high seas” (348).34 This mutuality is significant in that it further dissolves any sense of European
cultural or personal hegemony over less advantaged, oppressed peoples of the former colonial
world.
The Aesthetics of Ambiguity
I’d like to conclude with the observation that Erpenbeck’s aesthetics motivates readers,
but not necessarily to a particular viewpoint. Her choice of facts and examples in the
Tatsachenroman tend to elicit reader sympathy with the migrants, but they do not push readers
to take on their cause as her main character does. Erpenbeck seeks rather to free her readers
to decide matters for themselves. As with Schiller, the aesthetic functions as a pathway to
freedom. Likewise, Hartsock argues that the subversive nature of narrative literary journalism
lies in the ambiguity that its aesthetic presents regarding cultural norms (5). Erpenbeck
achieves this by a) structural arrangements of narrative elements that reveal ambiguity and
paradox and b) depicting characters who are complex and not exclusively sympathetic. As
mentioned above, Richard can have antiquated views of the Africans, associated with colonial
and Nazi stereotypes. His first reaction to realizing his wallet is missing at the grocery store is
to wonder if Rufu, the migrant behind him in line, has taken it (161). Many of Richard’s
everyday concerns and those of his friends - the pedestrian details of Richard’s routines (e.g. an
egg with breakfast only on Sundays, 32) or perhaps most crassly revealed in the disconnected
snippets of banality in conversations fleetingly overheard at a New Year’s or birthday party of
Richard’s friends (255-56, 339-48) – come across as pathetically trivial, structurally juxtaposed
as they are with the traumas of disorder, violence, chaos, and death experienced by the
migrants.
Although readers who share Richard’s archetypical European perspectives reaching
back to origins of their culture in antiquity may at first believe that Erpenbeck is presenting them
34 „Ja, im Prinzip genauso wie auf dem Meer.“ (348)
30
with a model main character with whom they can identify, Richard’s application of European
humanistic ideals, his desire to be hospitable (as in Kant’s prescriptive), leads by no means to
unambiguously positive decisions or appropriate action on his part. He regularly offers the
migrant interviewees unfamiliar food and drink that they invariably decline. Or at the end of what
he believes to be a failed interview, Richard sees a hopeful sign in Osarobo’s answer to what he
hopes for: he dreams of playing the piano. Inviting him home to play, he learns that Osarobo
has never seen a piano before, but only after he has offered him sheet music of Beethoven and
Bach. Or with Rufu, a migrant who happens to speak Italian, Richard believes he can relate to
him and make his life better by inviting him home where he can read Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Or when Karon tells him of how his family in Ghana could make ends meet if they could only
buy a small plot of land for farming Richard gives him the €3,000 purchase price (275ff), but is
shocked that Karon gets no a proper receipt for the transfer, that property ownership is validated
by oral oaths based on oral tradition passed down through generations, that the king must first
approve the purchase. Richard’s concept of ownership has ruled Germany since the adoption
of Roman law in the late Middle Ages, something totally foreign in Ghana. But the purchase
goes smoothly, despite Richard’s reservations about its pre-modern character. In fact, Richard
is amazed and pleased. From the moment he decided to give Karon the money for the farm
until the moment it belonged to him only 14 hours have elapsed (282), a far cry from the weeks
it took him and his wife to purchase a small plot after unification: the clearance in property
ownership in record books from 1945, the money transfers through banks and escrow, the
various documents and signatures required of him (277).
Richard is not only beginning to see the validity and effectiveness of non-European
traditions but is also accepting their perspectives as his own. A highly instructive use of the
trope of visibility illustrates this very mixing of traditions that fundamentally disrupts the primacy
of Western culture in which he is rooted. As the African migrants become an ever-greater
31
presence in his routine, the interconnections between African and Western cultures become
ever more apparent to him. Surprisingly, they appear in an area most familiar to him: Greek
mythology. Re-reading Herodotus, Richard recognizes, for the first time, the presence of the
nomadic Berber culture in the Greek pantheon. “Much of this . . . he had known virtually his
whole life but not until today are things getting combined in new and different ways. Truly, how
often must one re-learn things one once learned, discover them again and again, how many
layers must one remove until one really understands things to their core?” (177).35 While his
studies had rooted him firmly in a Western cultural tradition, one he had originally superimposed
on the migrants in order to relate to them at all, this knowledge was also infused with
unrecognized realities that opened the possibility and then the discovery and confirmation of a
cosmopolitan connectedness to other peoples and cultures.
The migrants, too, display behaviors not immediately sympathetic, however
understandable. Richard’s first interviews take place in shelter rooms at midday where the
majority of roommates are still asleep on their palettes, an idleness due to unemployment
imposed by immigration authorities. They show little enthusiasm for their German classes,
unmotivated due to an uncertain future in the country and preoccupied as they are with recent
traumas and concern for families left behind. Rashid, the “Hurler of Thunderbolts” is impatient
and tempestuous in his frustration with German bureaucracy. Osarobo forgets about going to
Richard’s to play piano and is still asleep in his room when Richard arrives (145). Later it is
unclear whether Osarobo repays Richard’s kindness by ransacking his home while he is away
at a conference (315ff).
This uncertainty, despite several attempts to ascertain Osarobo’s culpability
surreptitiously, flows into Richard reflecting on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and
35 “Vieles . . . hat er beinahe sein ganzes Leben über gewusst, aber erst heute . . . mischt sich wieder alles anders und neu. Wie oft wohl muss einer das, was er weiß, noch einmal lernen, wieder und wieder entdecken, wie viele Verkleidungen abreißen, bis er die Dinge wirklich versteht bis auf die Knochen?“
32
Schrödinger’s cat (318). Imbedded in this image from quantum physics that in its day
fundamentally challenged the rational, ordered world proposed by the European Enlightenment
science is also the challenge posed by this novel to its readers, wonderfully aesthetically
presented by the writer: in the instability and uncertainty of a culture in flux, infused with new
perspectives, values, and customs, reader/citizens may determine whether that new cultural life
flourishes or whether it is rejected in favor of a wishful return to the traditional, whose conditions
may no longer exist. Can Schrödinger’s cat be suspended between life and death forever?
Not once it becomes visible. It is the choice of the reader/citizens to determine how and when
they decide to see.
In sum, we first met Richard at his home, newly retired and deciding how to relocate and
organize all his office books in bookshelves at home, including the Merseburger Zaubersprüche:
“Bone to bone, blood to blood, so may they be mended,” as he recalls (15), the final verses of a
charm to heal an injury, employing the magical nature of Germanic alliteration and material
affinities, similarly found in Neoplatonic natural magic. In order to heal and make a broken
world whole again one must join together things that are alike. As the novel begins, Richard
arranges his bookshelves exactly so, books side-by-side assembled by literary epochs. This is
not a dialectic view of the world and, on the face of it, a view inimical to the integration of
difference, of the African refugees, into German society and culture: bone to bone, blood to
blood. It also brings to mind another blood image, Jus sanguinis (right of blood), a principle of
nationality law by which citizenship is not determined by place of birth but by having one or both
parents who are citizens of that state. Paradoxically, however, Richard’s humanistic training
provides him with an initial point of connection with the lives and stories of the migrants,
ultimately resulting at the end of this Tatsachenroman in the possibility of a healing community
of difference where Tristan, Apollo, the Hurler of Thunderbolts and 9 others occupy the same
33
space with Richard in his home. This possibility is conveyed through the complexities of a
literary aesthetic whereby readers can response but are free to choose how they do so.
The novel ends with the beginning of an experiment, which its readers may choose to
pursue or set aside. Whereas an understanding of commonality in difference has led Richard to
actively embrace certain responsibilities of world citizenship, the aesthetics of the novel have
inscribed a path to that end that is not unambiguous, leaving readers with many ethical issues
unresolved. While “Bone to bone, blood to blood” may no longer serve as the formula to move
forward, Erpenbeck encourages and allows her readers to compose new language most
appropriate for their own individual understandings. Walking to the migrant center earlier in the
novel, Richard is reminded how along the way things have changed in his lifetime, how he must
deal with an altered environment: a grocery store in GDR times is now a branch bank, a
dilapidated house is now a sandlot, and he asks himself what would he be thinking in the future
about the large brick building across the way: “The Africans were once housed here once.
Would he occupy a place in their stories? Perhaps. And would it matter?” (189). An open
question that is posed to the readers as well as to himself.
WORKS CITED (so far)
Apel, Friedmar. „Wir wurden, werden, sind sichtbar.“ Review of Gehen, ging, gegangen by
Jenny Erpenbeck. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. 16 Sept. 2015. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.
<http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/gehen-ging-
gegangen-von-jenny-erpenbeck-13770081.html?printPagedArticle=true#pageIndex_2>.
Erpenbeck, Jenny. Gehen, ging, gegangen. München: Knaus, 2015.
34
---. Video interview with Denis Scheck. ARD series: „druckfrisch: neue Bücher mit Denis
Scheck.“ 4 Oct. 2015; available until 03.10.2020. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.
<http://www.daserste.de/information/wissen-kultur/druckfrisch/videos/jenny-erpenbeck-
gehen-ging-gegangen-100.html>.
Kermani, Navid. Einbruch der Wirklichkeit: Auf dem Flüchtlingstreck durch Europa. Mit dem
Magnum-Photographen Moises Saman. München: C. H. Beck, 2016.
Hartsock, John C. Literary Journalism and the Aesthetics of Experience. Amherst/Boston: U
Massachusetts Press, 2016.
Leddy, Tom. “The Nature of Everyday Aesthetics.” In The Aesthetics of Everyday Life. Ed.
Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith. New York, Columbia U Press, 2005): xx-xx.
Nussbaum, Martha. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 1997.
Olk, Claudia. Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Vision. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. web
Runciter, Glen. „Keine Literatur.” Customer review of Gehen, ging, gegangen by Jenny
Erpenbeck. Amazon.de. 13 Nov. 2015. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.
<
http://www.amazon.de/gp/customer-reviews/R36OPWUTGY678U/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw
_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=3813503704>.
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EXTRA STUFF
Narration: Actually the narration is complicated. Much of the time Richard, the main character,
engages in free indirect speech.so although it looks like an independent narrator is telling the
story or what's in his head, etc. it's really just Richard himself speaking or thinking - just without
the quotation marks. Problem is that sometimes you don't know when that stops and an
independent narrator steps in, although it's occasionally clear when the narrator describes
things that Richard himself is not experiencing. So why does and author do that? Good
question. If you are always in free indirect speech the reader is then trapped in the
consciousness of the character and can't get out, so you understand that a totally myopic view
of the world is being presented. Kafka, for example, uses this technique often and so cleverly
that you think that a real narrator is also present. With Erpenbeck, there is a real narrator, but
one who simply reports events and situations without taking a stand on them. BUT, just by
narrating something there may be implied criticism, at least irony. For example, Richard is
sitting with a migrant in a cafe and the migrant is having great difficulty talking about all the
trauma he has experienced in getting to Germany from Ghana. The narrator interrupts their
discussion to note that a customer comes in and orders a cappuccino and a piece of cake, as
she usually does every day at 4 pm. So an implied criticism of German routines contrasted with
the realities faced by the migrants. But why the split narrative style? Not sure, but in his free
indirect speech we see that Richard practices everyday routines just like the woman getting the
cappuccino and that that gets in the way of him relating to the migrants on their terms. But that i
simply a reality and not something that the narrator (or the author) is suggesting must be
changed. Anyway, I have to think about all this.
Do something with the distinction on p 64 Volk der Dichter and Volk der Mörder!
36
The second, functions similarly in the novel. The trauma involves not something out of
Germany’s past that current Germans must deal with but current events where again they are
asked to deal with a situation they may have had no direct hand in creating, but with which they
culturally are found complicit (although Erpenbeck never makes this connection explicit, that is:
selling arms, economic subjugation, ignoring ethically abhorrent events. It also appears as a
metaphor when Awad’s memory of his grandmother surfaces briefly and then disappears, other
parts of her fully lost (75). The visibility trope is thus multi-faceted, involving German identity,
both cultural and individual, and the identity of individual migrants. Erpenbeck’s novel is didactic
in that the trope of visibility exposes both the positive and negative personal and negative
abstract legal consequences of individuation regarding a resolution of the current migration
crisis. On the other hand, it shows how quickly the strictures of a Rechtsstaat, even within the
idealism of Europe as Enlightenment project, can act against its own cosmopolitan values of
human rights and human empathy.
as being part of an Enlightenment Germany that spawned a modern society and culture. Not
only is this humanistic tradition and Richard’s professorial role in this land of poets and
philosophers and his home now in the Federal Republic a land of law and order (Rechtsstaat)
inaccessible to the wave of immigrants in the country,
but also the dark sides of modernism, rationality, and Eurocentrism with its albeit late
colonialism, Nazism, and communism, but also the academic conference in particular, since,
after traveling to Frankfurt from Berlin to give his paper, Richard returns to his home to find it
had been broken into and some things stolen, perhaps by the very African migrant who he had
been assisting. But I am getting ahead of myself. Suffice it to say, that our endeavor here at
the GSA comes under scrutiny in the novel as on the one hand hindering and on the other
perhaps also enabling an opening to a cosmopolitan sensibility that points to a resolution of the
migrant crisis the novel illustrates in detail.
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Enlightenment has two positive legacies that open Richard to these African asylum-seekers: the
focus on the individual so that the individuation allows him to empathize with each as an
individual with a name and personal history. Second is , however, also a commonality in our
humanity that all share, something that allows his interest in getting to know them in the first
place. However, its Eurocentric sides and hyper-rationalism not only create hindrances through
vast cultural differences that exist and lingering discrimination managed by the a hyper-rational
Rechtsstaat (with few exceptions), but also produced a subjugating culture resulting in
colonialism, Nazism and to a degree communism whose memory and legacy of guilt must be
confronted and resolved before empathy can emerge.