This book focuses on the refugee
crisis in Germany and confronts readers with the realities behind the mass
migration of asylum seekers.
The protagonist is Richard, a childless
widower who has recently retired from his position as a classics
professor. Until reunification, he lived
in East Germany. His life is placid and
routine until he takes an interest in the lives of a number of African refugees
temporarily housed nearby. He hears
their stories: how they left homelands
racked by poverty and violence, how they make hazardous journeys across the
Mediterranean, and how they are now trapped in a bureaucratic process which allows
them to do nothing but wait though they want to work and begin creating new
lives for themselves.
Richard is a flawed person. When he was married, he was unfaithful and
did not always treat his wife with compassion.
He is self-absorbed and almost totally ignorant about life outside his
academic interests. At first, getting to
know the refugees is just a research project for him. Over time, he gains companionship and finds a
new purpose for his life. He becomes
less self-centred and learns empathy; he learns “that one person’s vantage point
is just as valid as another’s, and in seeing, there is no right, no wrong.”
The situation of the refugees is
emphasized. The problems that forced
them to leave their homelands were often the result of European
colonialism: “the borders drawn by
Europeans may have no relevance at all for Africans. . . . He was struck by all
the perfectly straight lines, but only now does he grasp the arbitrariness made
visible by such lines.” Because of
European Union immigration policies, the men become the responsibility of the
country where they first landed (Italy) and so are unable to work in
Germany. Richard decries that the “endless
streams of people, who having survived the passage across a real-life sea, are
now drowning in rivers and oceans of paper” and concludes that “The more highly
developed a society is, the more its written laws come to replace common sense.” The men lose hope: “A life in which an empty present is occupied
by a memory that one cannot endure, in which the future refuses to show itself,
must be extremely taxing, Richard thinks, since this is a life without a
shoreline, as it were.” The repeated
words of one of the refugees are heart wrenching: “I looked in front of me and behind me and
saw nothing.”
Though Richard is a privileged
white European and the refugees are powerless black Africans, Richard comes to
recognize the common humanity of all: “the
difference between one person and another is in fact ridiculously small” though
we seem to separate ourselves because of “a few pigments in the material that’s
known as skin in all the languages of the world.” What is important is that underneath our clothing,
“every one of us is naked and must surely, let’s hope, have taken pleasure in
sunshine and wind, in water and snow, have eaten or drunk this and that tasty
thing, perhaps even have loved someone and been loved in return before dying
one day.”
Because of his displacement as a
child during World War II and his initial disorientation when Germany was
reunified, Richard understands the “everlasting flux and the ephemeral nature
of all human constructs, the sense that all existing order is vulnerable to
reversal.” The mass migration Europe is
witnessing is not new: “This movement of
people across the continents has already been going on for thousands of year,
and never once has this movement halted.”
Yet people apparently believe that “we’ve now arrived at the end of
history, making it possible to use violence to suppress all further movement
and change? Or have the people living
here under untroubled circumstances and at so great a distance from the wars of
others been afflicted with a poverty of experience, a sort of emotional
anemia? 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?”
The author reminds Europeans that
they should not think they deserve their economic prosperity and privileged
lives: progress “is often based on quite
different principles than punishment and reward. . . . Neither the material
prosperity [in West Germany] nor the planned economy [in East Germany] could be
explained by any particular trait of the German citizens in question – they were
just the raw material for those political experiments. . . . But if this prosperity
couldn’t be attributed to their own personal merit, then by the same token the
refugees weren’t to blame for their reduced circumstances.” And it’s senseless to deny refugees “permission
to work while at the same time reproaching them for idleness.” And isn’t it ironic that though the refugees
cannot work, their arrival creates employment for Germans; in fact, one of their
protests creates “half-time jobs for at least twelve Germans.”
This book should prick the conscience
of its readers. How much do we know about
what is happening in Africa? How many of us even know that Africa has 54
countries? (No, Nambia is not one!) Do we regard asylum-seekers as threatening
our way of life? The novel is also a
call to action because “There but for the grace of God, go I.” For me, one of the most powerful statements in
the novel is “only if [the refugees] survived Germany now would Hitler truly
have lost the war.” But even for those
of us not living in Europe, the subject matter has relevance.
No comments:
Post a Comment