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The Contemporaries of “Gehen, Ging, Gegangen”
What is contemporary?
Contemporary has many definitions. It can be used as an adjective, meaning “belonging to or occurring in the present” or “living or occuring at the same time.” Contemporary art is the art of today. Art that was produced in the 20th and 21st centuries. In literature, contemporary is generally thought of as any piece written after the end of World War II. Contemporary literature contains within it many sub-genres, such as cyberpunk, contemporary romance, and New Wave science fiction. Gehen, Ging, Gegangen certainly falls into the category of contemporary literature, having been written and published in 2015. The story is also set in post-Berlin Wall Germany, some time around 2010.
The novel is also contemporary in the sense that it has great cultural relevance and heavily resonates with its time period and the cultural issues surrounding Germany during the 2010s. In 2015, Germany took in approximately one million refugees from around the globe, almost half of which came from Syria (image 1). To put this number in perspective, the United States took in about 700,000 refugees over the span of ten years (2005–2015) (image 2). It would have been hard to live in Germany in 2015 and not be exposed to the plight of the refugees, much as Richard was in the beginning of the novel. Hunger strikes. Protests. News stories. All of these were happening all around Berlin and in other large cities in Germany, bombarding Germans with images and stories of refugees scattered throughout their country.
Not only does this novel tell the stories of refugees, it also highlights the issues and bureaucratic obstacles the refugees face during their flights and whilst in Germany. These were, and are, real issues faced by hundreds of thousands of refugees, not only in Germany but in many European countries and the United States.
Contemporary can also be used as a noun. A contemporary is “a person or thing living or existing at the same time as another.” By that definition, everyone alive today, from Oprah to Ryan Reynolds to the barista that made your coffee this morning, are contemporaries of one another. That means that Richard and the refugees he meets during his retirement are contemporaries. More simply, a contemporary is a peer or an equal. So Richard and the refugees begin the story as contemporaries in the sense that they exists at the same time, but as the story progresses they become contemporaries in the more intimate sense of being peers.
If we want to think of who the novel’s contemporaries are, we must first decide who the novel is written for. Is it written for refugees, people like Awad and Karon and Rashid? Or is it written for people like Richard, those who haven’t personally experienced life as a refugee but claim empathy with those who have? My inclination is to say the latter is true. The book just feels like it wasn’t meant to be a story about refugees, but rather a story with refugees. The story is centered around Richard, a white upper-middle class German male, and the stories of the refugees are all brought back somehow to Richard’s own experience, how he sees them, or what he thinks of them. Erpenbeck takes away the agency of the refugees by doing this and ultimately makes her story about Richard. In a review of Gehen, Ging, Gegangen, the Spiegel.de criticizes Erpenbeck for exactly that, for making the story about Richard, a wealthy citizen who feels enlightened and fails to recognize his own ignorance. Because of this, the critic says that the book is attributed to those who will see themselves in Richard.
So who are the contemporaries of Gehen, Ging, Gegangen? Is it the refugees who struggled and fought their way to Germany to find a better life only to find themselve stuck in bureaucratic lines and mountains of red tape? Or is it the financially stable, healthy, white German; the people like Richard? I think it’s the latter, the typical German citizen. I’ll leave you with a question. Why does Erpenbeck choose to make the contempoeraries of this novel the German citizen? Is it to make the story more accessible and relatable to the German public or is it to make the public feel better about the refugee crisis and their (in)action?
