CHRISTIANE STECKENBILLER Colorado College Futurity, Aging, and Personal Crises: Writing about Refugees in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff ’s Widerfahrnis (2016) “Zeit an sich. Vergehen soll sie, aber auch nicht vergehen” (Erpenbeck 11). Time, the passing of time, and what to do with one’s time—those are some of the concerns that Jenny Erpenbeck’s white, male, and recently retired protagonist, Richard, ex- presses at the very beginning of her 2015 novel Gehen, ging, gegangen. Reither, Bodo Kirchhoff ’s protagonist in the 2016 novella Widerfahrnis—also a white male pen- sioner—is occupied with similar questions, pondering “das Menschliche und die Zeit” (14), surprised that time still passes at all and that common categories of time still hold some or any purchase in our contemporary world. The two texts have more in common. It is through the idea of time that they address the massive displacement of refugees and how this topic has been perceived by white majority culture; and it is because of this timely subject that both texts garnered a lot of attention in the German literary world: Kirchhoff took home the German Book Prize for his novella in 2016; Erpenbeck was shortlisted for the same prestigious award in 2015.Yet Er- penbeck and Kirchhoff are by far not the only writers in the German-speaking con- text to think creatively and critically about the “refugee crisis.” Writers of different backgrounds, such as Elfriede Jelinek, Maxi Obexer, Catalin Dorian, Olumide Popoola, Ilja Trojanow, Navid Kermani, Olga Grjasnowa, or Abbas Khider—in no particular order—have turned toward the subject matter and written what Brent O. Peterson calls “migration narratives,” a term he recently introduced to avoid “mak[ing] choices based on authors’ biographies” (85) and to include film and liter- ature. This recent engagement with migration and displacement attests to the mag- nitude, urgency, and prominence of the topic. Erpenbeck’s text, too, plays with perception, awareness, and attention through the notion of “visibility” and “invisi- bility,” while Kirchhoff similarly addresses the ways in which the continuous arrival of Europe’s perceived Others has been observed, barely noticed, or blocked out by the public in that he makes it a marginal topic, literally introducing migrant subjects “am Rande” (Platthaus), second to what most critics have identified as the text’s main theme, the brief love affair of an older couple. What deeply interests me here, though, is why Erpenbeck and Kirchhoff chose to explore displacement and migration through the lens of the white male retiree, 68 Te German Quarterly 92.1 (Winter 2019) ©2019, American Association of Teachers of German