Sphinx

How does our knowledge of classical antiquity relate to the present and its problems? How do we as classicists – to address at least a subset of my readers – engage with the world through our knowledge of the classical past, or is our chosen field of activity precisely a means of not engaging with the world? 

Jenny Erpenbeck’s magnificent, heartbreaking novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (shortly to appear in translation as Go Went Gone) is probably the first serious literary attempt at engaging with the plight of refugees in western Europe, the horrors that drive them here, the appalling conditions they endure and the heartlessness of the bureaucracy and nativist hatred that confronts them. It’s hard to believe that it won’t come to rank as one of the very best on this theme (even assuming anyone else tackles it at all), and it needs to be read for that alone. In its quiet, restrained way it is a deeply political and deeply angry novel, forcing us Europeans to confront our own failings and prejudices against those who arrive in ‘our’ comfortable, settled, peaceful lives.

In brief, Gehen Ging Gegangen narrates how Richard, a recently retired, widowed professor of Classical Philology from east Berlin, becomes intrigued (without really knowing why) by a group of refugees who protest silently outside the Berlin town hall, and gradually gets more and more involved in their lives. After the protest is brought to an end, the refugees are housed in the suburb where he lives; he gains access initially to ask them their stories, with vague claims about a research project.

Erpenbeck’s laconic, sometimes lapidary style, and her concern with words and language, perfectly, painfully invoke the depth of hurt behind the simple (because expressed in halting German, English or Italian) stories that the men tell of their experiences and feelings, in what is not said, or only partially said, or alternatively repeated again and again. Broke the memory, says Awad of the Libyan militiamen who destroyed the SIM cards of the guest workers’ phones. Broke the memory. Raschid repeats the names of his children, and their ages, but not what happened to them. Life is crazy, says Osarobo. Crazy life, crazy life.

We are drawn into the drama of these men’s traumatic pasts, their current existence in social and legal limbo, and the question of whether there is any hope for the future. However, this work has many layers; it’s also a novel about Richard’s own silences and evasions, his own hypocrisy as well as that of his society – and his own troubled past, alienated present and uncertain prospects. His motives are sometimes obscure even to himself – and certainly mixed, as he fantasises about the beautiful Ethiopia woman who teaches the refugees German and so volunteers as an assistant. He is human, all too human; naive, pedantic and by nature unconfrontational – at one point he sorts out the legal permits for a demonstration, then slips off home.

The fact that Richard is (or was) a classicist is not coincidental; not (merely) a convenient caricature of an unworldly academic, but a significant theme. At the beginning, his classical learning provides Erpenbeck with a way of characterising his naivety; because their names are alien to him, he gives many of the refugees nicknames – Apoll, Hermes, but also Tristan – and when they talk of having been in Sicily, he thinks at once of the temple at Agrigento.

But he is self-aware enough to recognise this tendency, and when one man says he is Tuareg – Richard at first can think only of the Volkswagen Toureg model – he sets about some proper research, beginning – naturally – with Herodotus’ account of the Garamantes and his account of Libya. Suddenly, his own knowledge appears in a new light, as the familiar Greek idea of the edge of the world, Atlas keeping heaven and earth apart, the customs of the Libyan tribes and so forth are unexpectedly connected to the present.

Much of what Richard reads on that November day, a few weeks after becoming emeritus, he’s known for almost his whole life, but today, through the small amount of knowledge which he now adds to it, it revombines in new and different forms. How often does someone have to relearn what he knows, discover it again and again, tear open how many disguises, until he really understands the things down to their bones? Is a lifetime long enough? His – or someone else’s? (177)

Above all, Richard is struck by the phenomenon of a world in motion, of migration as something that has always happened rather than as a modern phenomenon or a production of globalisation. People have been moving ceaselessly for thousands of years: for trade, war, seeking food and water, fleeing drought and plague, searching for gold, salt or iron. It is a kind of law of human beings: they don’t stay still.

To explain to a student that he doesn’t mean a moral law but rather a natural one, Richard would just have to point out of the window at how so many of the leaves, whose appearance in the spring had delighted him, now lay on the grass, while the buds for next spring were already formed. But there is no student here to ask him. (178)

And yet modern European societies seek to restrict this phenomenon, to present it as something new and unnatural and threatening, something that must be controlled –  just as the French had drawn arbitrary lines across the traditional territory of the Tuareg and divided them between different countries.

The second key episode of engagement with the classical offers a similar contrast between past and present: a sympathetic lawyer, who has been explaining the hopelessness of one refugee’s case, reaches for Tacitus’ Germania to read the section about German guest-friendship: it is forbidden among them to turn away a stranger from your door, but rather everything is shared, and there is no distinction between mine and yours. “And now,” he concludes, “2000 years later, there is Paragraph 23 Section 1: Right to Remain” – which rarely bestows such a right. Ancient history reveals consistencies and continuities in human behaviour and feelings, but also highlights the changes in law and custom, that have rendered the modern world harsher and less compassionate.

The central episode, both intellectually and personally, comes late in the novel when Richard accepts an invitation to a colloquium in Frankfurt to speak on Seneca – at very short notice, making it clear that he’s a last-minute replacement. Initially he plans just to rework chapters from the books he’s written on the topic – “but scarcely had he begun to flick through Seneca’s De Tranquillitate Amimi, new ideas came to him and he noticed how much pleasure his work still gave him.” (298) He’s clearly relieved and surprised to find that his mind is still active, that he can think in new ways and identify new connections.

If reason is indeed fiery material, then this is best seen in how, over the centuries, the thought of one sets off those of another, and keeps it alive. Further, the ancient idea of constant and endless change and mutability is actually familiar to Richard and his contemporaries, maybe from their wartime childhoods, maybe from their experience of the unexpected fragility of the Socialist system. But now people have forgotten, or have never known it, and believe in the end of history; they defend their peace so fiercely that it looks like war. And so his lecture for the colloquium ends up in a very different place, engaged and political and personal:

He speaks however not only about reason, but also memory, and power and powerlessness. He isn’t sure whether it’s the sort of lecture that he gave previously, when he was still at the Institute. In the break there is in the lobby coffee from big thermoses, as well as orange juice, mineral water and a few biscuits. The Tacitus specialist he knows is unfortunately not there, but there are a few others whom Richard knows, they greet him, clap him on the shoulder: So, what are you working on now – as a retiree? You’re not at the Institute any more? How long is it since we last saw one another? I’m flying over to Boston next week. So-and-so, he’s an extraordinarily interesting man. There’s a new translation, have you seen it? No one says a word about his lecture. (311-12)

When the others go back to hotel to get ready for dinner, he heads to the station and travels back to Berlin. It’s a recognition of his own marginality and irrelevance – and this had often been his experience in the past as well, returning to Berlin to look after his wife – but also of the facile obliviousness of mainstream scholarship to the world beyond the academy.

Things threaten to fall apart; Richard returns home to find he’s been burgled, and suspects one of the refugees to whom he’s been trying to teach piano and who knew he was away that evening; the whole group receives the official order that they are to be sent away from Berlin to different parts of the country, pending possible deportation, and certainly lose their current accommodation; and one of them seeks to set himself alight in Oranienplatz, where they’d previously demonstrated. But Richard doesn’t break; he and many of his friends find room for the refugees to sleep, and try to help them in other ways, and for the first time since his wife died he celebrates his birthday with a gathering of the whole group – even if this becomes a moment of melancholy self-revelation. He acknowledges openly, for the first time, not only his wife’s alcoholism but also the botched abortion – at his instigation, because it was too soon in his academic career – and the feeling that he hated her for the possibility that she might die; and the implication that this had then shaped all the subsequent decades together.

Then, I think, says Richard, it became clear to me, that what I feel is only the surface of everything that I don’t.

Like on the sea? asks Khalil.

Yes, basically just like on the sea. (348)

And so the novel ends. The word I’ve translated here as ‘feel’ is aushalte, which has a wide range of meanings including suffer, endure, go through, persevere, withstand etc. The contrast, I think, is not between things that were and were not experienced, but between things – equally traumatic and with consequences for later life – that were and were not acknowledged, recognised, spoken of. I’ll be interested to see how it’s rendered in the English translation.

The sea is the Mediterranean, which the refugees had struggled across – a barrier, rather than the unifying space of antiquity – with so many dying in the attempt. It is also memory (individual and collective) and tradition, and the past, and the world; and it is through acknowledging the limits of knowledge and self-knowledge, the fluid and perilous nature of existence, that Richard achieves a degree of reconciliation and wholeness, bringing his academic knowledge into engagement with the world and truly engaging with his fellow humans. The values of the classical world – guest-friendship and self-knowledge – are not lost for ever.