Go Went Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck

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Telling this tale through the eyes and voice of Richard, who had lived most of his life in GDR, and overnight seen the Berlin Wall and then GDR itself disappear, shows us, without being bombastic, that borders and nations are inherently fictions – and the decisions about who is allow to cross them therefore arbitrary.

I read this alongside Borders & Belonging by Pádraig Ó Tuama & Glenn Jordan – which explores the Book of Ruth and one of the prayers they include at the back begins

God of bodies,

if it is true that the earth is yours

and all within it,

then yours are the rocks and grasses

on every side

of every border…

The consequences of this for our treatment of asylum seekers, and migrants of all kinds, should be profoundly different from the current attitude of the UK and most other countries.

Richard reflects at one point that “The Africans probably had no idea who Hitler was, but even so: only if they survived Germany now would Hitler truly have lost the war.” (p50) And we can say the same about the UK.

These echoes of Germany’s past give a particular punch – but it is one we should not pretend we can side step.

Seeing an excessive police presence outside the place the refugees are staying, for Richard it “is already clear to him – the newspaper will report on the high cost of this deployment, and this country of bookkeepers will be aghast and blame the objects of the transport for the expense, as used to happen in other periods of German history, with regards to other transports.” (p209) Clearly we also blame the migrants for the costs we create for ourselves because of our lack of hospitality.

“...it occurs to Richard – it’s occurred to him many times now – that all the men he’s gotten to know here (these ‘dead men on holiday’) could just as easily be lying at the bottom of the Mediterranean. And conversely all the Germans who were murdered during the so-called Third Reich still inhabit Germany as ghosts, sometimes he even imagines that all these missing people along with their unborn children and the children of their children are walking beside him on the street, on their way to work or to visit friends, they sit invisibly in the cafes, take walks, go shopping, visit parks and the theater. 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 come so close to going astray in the mayhem of war and slipping down into the realm of the dead.” (p222)

The happen-stance of life and death, or being born a citizen or born a migrant, are so much the roll of the dice – we need to really on check our sense of entitlement, the congratulations we give ourselves on our essentially undeserved passport.

There are also reflections on Richard’s own grief, and the childless Richard thinking on beyond his own death “The old farmhouse cupboard missing a piece of its crown molding [sic] surely won’t share a household after his death with the cup in which he always makes his Turkish coffee in the afternoon…” (p9) our lives are a collection of meanings, memories, and things pieced together as a unique jigsaw – even if some of the pieces endure they will never be fitted together the same way again.

There are questions about what we actually mean by a “free” society - “Is the only freedom the fall of the Berlin wall brought him the freedom to go places he’s afraid of?” (p25) “One morning, he himself became the object of these tearful welcomes: the East Berliner who’d lived on this street that had been cut in half for twenty-nine years, crossing over on his way to freedom. But he hadn’t been on his way to freedom that morning, he was only trying to get to the University, punctually taking advantage of the S-Bahn station at the western end of his newly opened street. Unemotional and in a hurry, he-d used his elbows to fight his way through this weeping crowd – one of the disappointed liberators shouted an insult at his back – but for the very first time, Richard got to school in under twenty minutes.” (p33)

Richard is no saint, and that is part of the power, it is a slow process of befriending that opens him up, and there is some deep pain in his own life as well as the men that he tries to help. Richard says I realized “that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.” (p283) It is sometimes in dealing with one trauma that we bury an other more deeper pain.