Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

But there’s one more thing Richard understands at this moment: Karon’s worries have ground him down to such an extent that he’s even afraid to hope.

Psychology of he terrorized

The older he gets, the more grateful he is to have just as little idea as anyone else what is in store.

Peter told him that for the Incas the center of the universe wasn’t a point but a line where the two halves of the universe meet. Is this the scene unfolding before Richard’s eyes at the entrance to the asylum seekers’ residence?

Meaning. The line. Berlin Wall. Borders. What is the border?

Have people forgotten in Berlin of all places that a border isn’t just measured by an opponent’s stature but in fact creates him?

Is the question of power over one’s own life still above all a question of power, and not a question of life? Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/And, by opposing, end them.

Have you ever seen the gentlemen from the “refugee scene” or their supporters holding down a proper job or doing anything productive at all? Not me. Denying them permission to work while at the same time reproaching them for idleness is, Richard finds, a conceptually flawed construction.

Go, went, gone. The line dividing ghosts and people has always seemed to him thin, he’s not sure why, maybe because as an infant, he himself came so close to going astray in the mayhem of war and slipping down into the realm of the dead.

“Legal best practices” in united Germany — as soon was clear to former citizens of the GDR — picked up from the point in time when the East had been organized around capitalist principles, in other words 1945.

Discuss this practice. How would it feel? What is fair? Palestine, Israel More boundaries

Until 1989, Richard and his wife had lived their lives without hearing the words “land title” a single time.

the thought of everlasting flux and the ephemeral nature of all human constructs, the sense that all existing order is vulnerable to reversal, has always seemed perfectly natural, maybe because of their postwar childhoods, or else it was witnessing the fragility of the Socialist system under which they’d lived most of their lives and that collapsed within a matter of weeks.

Must living in peace — so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world — inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?

Across the Algerian border, three days on foot across a rocky desert. Some just lie down and can’t go on. You leave them behind. You keep walking. What else are you supposed to do?

Life, the journey. Death, the letting go.

And might memory too be compared to what these men have been through? How

Memory. The modern world has relegated it to books, paper and now machines. The old ways things were passed down. Memory was used.

what these men have lived through also says something about power and powerlessness.

The more highly developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense. In Germany, I estimate that only two-thirds of our laws are still anchored in the emotional lives of the people, as it were. The other third are laws pure and simple, formulated with such a high level of precision and abstraction that all basis in human emotion has become superfluous and thus ceases to exist.

this new and yet already so old century with its endless streams of people who, having survived the passage across a real-life sea, are now drowning in rivers and oceans of paper.

It’s always back and forth, back and forth, and then at a certain point it’s only back and never forth, but you don’t know when that’s going to be. Now I understand, he says, why they call it a wave function. And why they call death a wave function collapse.

Various people when asked to help say: We keep hearing that these men are completely traumatized. How do we know they won’t trash our apartment? They say: Even if we help them, the problem still won’t be solved. They say: If we take them in, we won’t be doing them any favors since there are so many Nazis in the neighborhood. And also: Even if we let them sleep here, what will they live on?

think that’s when I realized, says Richard, that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure. Like the surface of the sea? asks Khalil. Actually, yes, exactly like the surface of the sea.