This essay offers a comparative analysis of Jenny Erpenbeck's Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff's Widerfahrnis (). Both texts refract the massive displacement of refugees and the ways in which white majority culture interacts with black bodies through the lens of the white male retiree. In line with recent trends identified by Stuart Taberner and Karen Leeder, by way of Edward Said, these texts’ male protagonists embody an aging Western society and an attempt to come to terms with the past—Europe's recent past, National Socialism, and its colonial history. Yet although “futurity is pressing” (Leslie Adelson), both men ultimately fail at this endeavor. Thinking through migration in conjunction with the Nazi past, colonialism, European legal frameworks, Bildung, and the German middle class, the two texts thus beg the question of how contemporary Germany might find better strategies to tackle the challenges that mass migration raises for discourses of German futurity. © 2019, American Association of Teachers of German

aging memory Refugees Jenny Erpenbeck futurity Bodo Kirchhoff

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