When he sees it on the evening news later, he wonders: why were they invisible to him? He eats his dinner and the TV cameras capture Africans fasting to protest their treatment, holding a sign that reads “We Become Visible.” He had walked right past them. Crossing the square, Richard doesn’t notice their rally. The African refugees that crowd Berlin’s Alexanderplatz refuse to be displaced by a German government that first agrees to meet their needs, then revokes that agreement. But he is about to meet war victims whose sanity, indeed whose futures, is far more precarious than his. His greatest concern, as he surveys the boxes of books that have been his life, is that he not lose his marbles. Richard, the author’s stand-in, is a newly retired professor emeritus with time on his hands. It asks the same question Michael Ignatieff did in his provocative 1984 essay “The Needs of Strangers”: does the welfare state fail to provide for our most basic human need, the need to belong? Three decades later, with refugees flooding Europe, that question can no longer be ignored. Very little in Jenny Erpenbeck’s previous fiction-allegorical, timeless-prepares a reader for the immediacy and moral heft of Go, Went, Gone. By Lisa Mullenneaux Oranienplatz, Berlin, Germany.
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