Tackling the Now
“Gehen, Ging, Gegangen” and the portrayal of contemporary issues in writing
When reading current and acclaimed literature I often find myself pondering the idea that everything we read in literature classes was at one point new. It isn’t that profound of a thought, but the things we now deem classics weren’t always there. Not only were they new, but they were addressing subjects important to their times. The Great Gatsby, possibly the most widely read book in tenth grade classrooms nationwide, serves as a time capsule, a primary source that looks at fears of the fading American Dream and excesses of society seen in Prohibition-era America. Bertolt Brecht’s haunting poem “An Die Nachgeborenen” gives modern audiences a chilling view of the hopelessness felt by intellectuals who fled as Nazis continued to increase their power through the 1930s. These writings served the purpose of taking on issues at the forefronts of the minds of the public. These were contemporary works. They were addressing new issues that were going to play roles in the future, and writers wrote while the events were unfolding. All of this leads to my ultimate question when I read modern works that tackle the issues of the time: Will this be something readers will analyze years down the road?
Jenny Erpenbeck has thrown her novel Gehen, Ging, Gegangen into the modern discourse as one of the first popular portrayals of Germany’s ongoing refugee crisis in literature. The 2015 novel follows Richard, a widowed, newly retired classics professor who involves himself in the lives of a group of asylum seeking refugees who had been protesting in Berlin. With the exception of a few chapters, the story is told from Richard’s perspective, with an outside narrator giving readers a tour of Richard’s flashbacks and trains of thought. Over the course of the novel, Richard interviews the refugees and ultimately gets deeply involved with many of them.
Following critical reception of the novel is a ride of its own. When a novel is dealing with issues that are as of yet unresolved, it gains a certain appeal. We often use the media at our disposal to make sense of the world around us. Critical reviews of this novel show that when a novel deals in contemporary issues, response to it can be largely based on portrayal of the issues rather than the novel’s merits. This can be seen in glowing reviews Gehen, Ging, Gegangen’s English translation has received from American publications like the New York Times and the New Yorker. Claire Messud’s New York Times review heavily praises Erpenbeck for tackling such a hotly debated subject. Richard gets to know the refugees over the course of the novel, and through his interviews, we as readers learn about how the refugees have struggled in their lives, how they have lost their children or moved from war zone to war zone with no clearly safe future. This humanizes the refugees and provides context, particularly for those who may have issues with giving asylum to refugees.
However, a problem that seems often overlooked in these English reviews of the novel is the way in which refugees are used for seemingly the sole purpose of advancing Richard’s story. While we certainly learn a great deal about the refugees as individuals over the course of the novel, this is always and ultimately Richard’s story, and at times the refugees feel far more like objects than characters, pieces that are meant to help further the protagonist’s personal growth. On the surface, this novel is tackling some of the hottest contemporary issues in German society. Should Germany accept refugees? What does it mean to be German now? And it is for this reason that the reviews seem to praise it, the idea of tackling contemporary issues.
This is where more critical reviews shine. Strangely there seems to be a line, where German reviews of the novel are far more critical than English ones. Spiegel’s review by Dana Buchzik accurately describes a key issue in that Richard seems trapped in an old way of thinking. As a scholar of classics, he attempts to link the refugees he meets to characters in old Greek myths. In doing this, Erpenbeck makes Richard seem to try to make the refugees seem more familiar, more European.
Even more critical is Kritisch-Lesen’s review. This review comes to a conclusion I myself had while reading Gehen, Ging, Gegangen; the novel often feels incredibly safe, bizarrely enough. The review notes that it feels like it was written for the types of people who review literature, privileged types who often inhabit a very small bubble of thought, the literary equivalent of Oscar bait. And this is true. We do see the true horrors that the refugees have gone through in their journey, but the story comes across as the white hero saving the day for the poor Africans. At the end of the book, while the refugees’ future is still uncertain, readers are left with a bizarre ending where Richard and his friends open their homes to house the asylum seekers. It’s an ending that doesn’t sit well with what it seems Erpenbeck sought to do.
None of this is to say that Gehen, Ging, Gegangen is a bad book. On the contrary, Erpenbeck’s writing is thoughtful and often beautiful. Her extended metaphor of the drowned man in the lake is something the German equivalent of a Literature 1000 course would drool over. However, it struggles in truly addressing the contemporary topic it seems so desperately eager to cover. Erpenbeck doesn’t seek to unravel the complexities of the situation and how it represents a changing world as a whole. What we’re left with is mostly another story of a white man who grows to understand himself through the stories of others.
As I said to begin this post, I often wonder while reading contemporary literature whether what I’m reading will be read years down the road. Being well-written is certainly part of what makes books survive, but even more important are the subjects they tackle and the ways in which they do it. Gehen, Ging, Gegangen looks at possibly the most important issue in Germany today, but if it is to be remembered, it will not be because of the refined take it gives on the refugee crisis.
