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ABSTRACT
The 2015 immigration wave brought profound changes to European society in the form of a welcoming culture (Willkommenskultur) on the one hand, and in the rise of xenophobia and of right-wing populism on the other. Over the past few years, much attention has rightly been paid to literary and essayistic works by immigrant writers dealing with the challenges they have encountered in “Fortress Europe.” At the same time, there has been a reckoning within the privileged classes in Europe once their complacent reality had been disturbed by confrontations with war and poverty and the immigration these have caused. This article explores two recent highly-acclaimed novels on the subject of immigration and its effects on German society—Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone and Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis—and by drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, analyzes how encounters with refugees both disturb their protagonists’ lives and lead to their personal transformation.
Notes
1. “Immigration concerns fall in Western Europe, but most see need for newcomers to integrate into Society.” Pew Research Center, 22 October 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/22/immigration-concerns-fall-in-western-europe-but-most-see-need-for-newcomers-to-integrate-into-society/.
2. Schiffauer, “The Refugees-Welcome Movement.”
3. Kirchhoff’s novella has yet to be translated and the title, borrowed from Heidegger, is difficult to translate. Kirchhoff has stated that for him the word Widerfahrnis reflects a hidden life principle (Lebensprinzip) but also suggests an existential moment. The closest translation is probably “experience” or “affect.”
4. See Badura, “Migration erzählen“; Ludewig, “Homage to Civil Society”; and Steckenbiller, “Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises.”
5. Besides the works cited in the previous note, see also Stan, “A Life without a Shoreline,” 795–808.
6. See Steckenbiller, “Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises,” for an overview of the critical reception of the novel.
7. Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone, 17; hereafter page references are cited in the text.
8. Studies have shown that increased immigration does not directly lead to increased incidents of terrorism. See McAlexander, “How Are Immigration and Terrorism Related?”, 179–95.
9. Wild, “Preface,” in Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 14.
10. Stone, “Trauma, Postmemory, and Empathy,” 3.
11. Richard fled Silesia with his mother at the end of the World War II and was himself a refugee at an early point in his life, which instilled a sense of empathy in him, as he begins to see the wave of migrants as a new stage in a longer, broader narrative of German history.
12. Morgan argues in “Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face,” that Levinas’s face “refers to an aspect of one person’s being present to another that has its descriptive features, to be sure, but that also has those other features that I call ‘appeal’ and ‘command’” (65). This is linked to the ethical appeal and gesture that the Other makes in seeking acknowledgement.
13. Morgan, “Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face,” 62.
14. Levinas, Time and the Other, quoted in Morgan, “Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face,” 60.
15. Ibid., 64.
16. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171, 173.
17. Levinas, Humanism of the Other, 63.
18. Bell, “Europe’s ‘New Jews’,” 65. This thesis is also debated among scholars, as evidenced by the titles of various studies. A 2017 study from the University of Zürich on the rise of right-wing populism was entitled “It’s Not the Economy Stupid! Explaining the Electoral Success of the German Right-Wing Populist AFD.” https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/cis-dam/Working_Papers/WP94_A4_newest.pdf; while another analysis from UC-Berkeley was titled “It’s the German Economy, Stupid! Economic Inequality Not Immigration, Explains the Far-Right Rise in Germany.” https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2017/09/27/its-the-german-economy-stupid-economic-inequality-not-immigration-explains-the-rise-of-the-far-right-in-germany/.
19. Cited in Foroutan and Kubiak, “Ausschluss und Abwertung,” 94.
20. See Tropp, “Contact Theory, Intergroup,” who cites Allport.
21. Andreas Platthaus, “Vier Tage eines neuen Lebens.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 September, 2016. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/rezensionen/belletristik/rezension-zu-bodo-kirchhoffs-widerfahrnis-14432276.html. Christian Schröder, “Vom Ende der Hutgesichter.” Die Zeit, 1 October 2016. https://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2016-09/bodo-kirchhoff-widerfahrnis-roman.
22. Steckenbiller takes issue with this portrayal in the novel, even though Kirchhoff has stated that Italy (and the South in general) is a “Sehnsuchtsrichtung,” a direction of yearning. See his interview with Müller, “Es nervt mich, wenn die Leute sagen.”
23. Sabine Peschel, “A Short Story with a Dense Narrative: German Book Prize Winner Bodo Kirchhoff’s ‘Widerfahrnis’,” Deutsche Welle, 18 October 2016. https://www.dw.com/en/a-short-story-with-a-dense-narrative-german-book-prize-winner-bodo-kirchhoffs-widerfahrnis/a-36074958.
24. Steckenbiller, “Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises,” 79.
25. Agier, Managing the Undesirables, 1.
26. Bauman, Strangers at Our Door, 90, 91.
27. In “Migration erzählen,” Badura draws a parallel between the description of refugees to the “amorphous masses” in postcolonial literature (63).
28. Steckenbiller, “Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises,” 79.
29. Morgan, “Ethical Content of the Face-to-Face,” 59.
30. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe: “Denn was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (171).
31. See two interviews where Kirchhoff elaborates on his interpretation of the word: Lothar Müller, “Es nervt mich, wenn die Leute sagen: Unser Land wird sich nicht verändern.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 October 2016. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/bodo-kirchhoff-im-interview-es-nervt-mich-wenn-die-leute-sagen-unser-land-wird-sich-nicht-veraendern-1.3214683; and Katharina Haase, “Die Sprache des Erzählens,” Prager Zeitung, 15 December 2016. https://www.pragerzeitung.cz/diesprache-des-erzaehlens/.
32. Ludewig, “Homage to Civil Society,” 32.
33. Steckenbiller, “Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises,” 79.
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David Coury
David Coury is Frankenthal Professor of Humanities, German and Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, USA, where he co-directs the Center for Civic Engagement and the Center for Middle East Studies.