Abstract

The 2015 immigration wave brought profound changes to European society in the form of a welcoming culture (Willkommenskultur) on the one hand, and in the rise of xenophobia and of right-wing populism on the other. Over the past few years, much attention has rightly been paid to literary and essayistic works by immigrant writers dealing with the challenges they have encountered in “Fortress Europe.” At the same time, there has been a reckoning within the privileged classes in Europe once their complacent reality had been disturbed by confrontations with war and poverty and the immigration these have caused. This article explores two recent highly-acclaimed novels on the subject of immigration and its effects on German society—Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone and Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis—and by drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, analyzes how encounters with refugees both disturb their protagonists’ lives and lead to their personal transformation.