Go, Went, Gone (Jenny Erpenbeck, 2017)

320 pages

Book club selection (via Zach; session held 17 March 2019).

Newly retired university professor (Richard) - lives alone - spots a group of African asylum-seekers in a Berlin park, and gets involved.

I liked it - author's main goal seems to be humanizing refugees at a time when that isn't always happening.  But she idealizes them a bit as uniformly thoughtful, gentle work-seekers; doesn't explain why they are all working-age men, etc.

Richard lives on a lake and there is a subplot about a person drowning there, an unrecovered body.  I guess it relates to these folks crossing the Mediterranean, too often unsuccessfully.

Richard and his wife (now dead) didn't have a very good relationship, not quite sure how that fit the tale.

Author threads in the East Berlin - West Berlin border, crossings, etc.  Which is an interesting comparison though I don't know that it leads us anywhere.

Some useful points about arbitrary borders, movements of peoples - but nothing much on all the hard questions - what policy should countries be adopting to deal with immigration?  Including what types of special provisions for legitimate asylum seekers?  How to think of sufferers in countries not adjacent to the Mediterranean or other borders - do they count?  How much to help these folks relative to domestic downtrodden in each country?

And:  how many folks can a country, or a given community within a country, absorb without losing the common culture that does underpin communities?  Throughout the book the author is citing things that are distinctively German (or Western or Christian) - Bach, Oedipus, Sundays of Advent, Christmas, Goethe, etc.  Universal human shared values run deeper yes, but the localized stuff is still important.  Often pointed out (not in this book) how Westerners altered cultures they encountered, but . . .

All of this seems much more difficult in Europe than in the US - we are protected by oceans from most random arrivals, don't have as many international borders, have lots of history absorbing immigrants, etc.