“Die Geburt des Trotzdem”: Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 579 “Die Geburt des Trotzdem”: Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen Nancy Nobile University of Delaware Abstract: This analysis treats three interrelated strands that braid through Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015)� (1) It traces the main character’s development within the context of a Bildungsroman that breaks with convention not only by featuring a protagonist of advanced age, but - quite atypically - by withholding information about his past and his inner life� (2) It explores ways in which Erpenbeck’s narrative echoes Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig yet rejects its self-involved fascination with depth in favor of (3) outward-reaching action and rhizomatic alliances with others� The protagonist of Gehen, ging, gegangen skirts his own depths, yet this very behavior makes him part of a rhizomatic network with such strength, that he can ultimately accept and share his past� Keywords: Gehen, ging, gegangen, the Bildungsroman, the rhizome, intertextuality, Der Tod in Venedig A learned widower in the autumn of his life, unsure how to proceed with his work, takes a walk one day� And the walk launches him on an utterly transformative adventure� His classically trained mind casts the foreign youth he then encounters as mythological gods, figures from ancient statuary, and the heroes of epic narrative� The man grows intrigued, begins to write a new project, but soon the experience itself becomes the project� This is the rising action of Thomas Mann’s modernist novella Der Tod in Venedig (1912), and also of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Gehen, ging, gegangen , published about a century later in 2015� After the rising action, the two narratives continue to evince parallels, as will be shown here, yet their resolutions diverge diametrically� Gustav von Aschenbach abandons the rigid self-control that had powered his professional life, succumbs to his “Sympathie mit dem Abgrund” (84), and dies a dissolute, pathetic figure who had tried to reclaim his youth out of love for a boy. His 580 Nancy Nobile trajectory is one of “ un becoming,” 1 “eine Raserei des Untergangs” (80), while Richard, the protagonist of Gehen, ging, gegangen continues to develop precisely by avoiding depth� Indeed, a drowned man in the depths of a lake, a source of horror to Richard, serves as cautionary leitmotif for the novel� Unlike Aschenbach, Richard has no sympathy with the abyss� He not only circumvents the lake-“nach oben lieblich, aber in Wahrheit eine Kluft” (17)-but also avoids the depths of his own psyche-the ballast of guilt and grief, the weight of wishes “wie Wackersteine” (174)-until, on the novel’s last pages, he has become strong enough to countenance them� He achieves this strength through outward connection with others, through lateral, rhizomatic growth� Richard’s incremental yet dramatic development at the age of sixty-eight 2 makes him the unlikely hero of a Bildungsroman, 3 a genre traditionally focused on youth� This analysis will trace three interrelated strands that braid through Gehen, ging, gegangen : (1) Richard’s development within an unconventional Bildungsroman; (2) the novel’s allusions to Tod in Venedig and the destructive inwardness it depicts; and (3) Richard’s eschewal of introspection in favor of outward-reaching, pragmatic actions that make him part of a rhizomatic network so wide and resilient that it ultimately enables him to look inward and accept his past� Both Erpenbeck’s novel and Tod in Venedig feature transnational encounters and explore the ethical issues that arise from them� Since both protagonists are past middle age, they come to their adventures with established codes of personal and professional behavior� Until his trip to Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach had defied every emotion and circumstance that threatened his literary productivity, for it had been his experience that: […] beinahe alles Große, was dastehe, als ein Trotzdem dastehe, trotz Kummer und Qual, Armut, Verlassenheit, Körperschwäche, Laster, Leidenschaft und tausend Hemmnisse zustande gekommen sei� Aber das war mehr als eine Bemerkung, es war eine Erfahrung, war geradezu die Formel seines Lebens und Ruhmes, der Schlüssel zu seinem Werk […]. (16, 66) Erpenbeck’s protagonist lives according to a similar formula� Early in the novel, when Richard goes to Oranienplatz to see the refugees, he finds that their occupation of the park has made ordinary activities now seem out of place there� Even sitting on a bench no longer feels appropriate, but he remains seated and thinks: “‘Die Verwandlung des Sitzens’ wäre auch ein guter Titel für einen Aufsatz� Richard bleibt sitzen, und zwar trotzdem� Immer wenn ein Trotzdem erscheint, das ist seine Erfahrung, wird es interessant� ‘Die Geburt des Trotzdem’ wäre auch ein guter Titel” (46). Richard not only shares Aschenbach’s appreciation of a “trotzdem” attitude, but for him, too, it derives from “Erfahrung�” Er- Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 581 penbeck then cements this intertextual reference through conspicuous allusion to Nietzsche’s Die Geburt der Tragödie , the text that provided the Dionysian/ Apollonian theme for Tod in Venedig. Clearly, persevering “despite” obstacles will serve Richard well when he begins to aid the refugees, yet this was already his stance before he met them� The novel’s opening chapters depict the challenges Richard faces, prime among them the possible imminence of death: “Vielleicht liegen noch viele Jahre vor ihm, vielleicht nur noch ein paar” (9)� Though he does not take an actual journey, as does Aschenbach, retirement from his position as a professor of Classics casts Richard onto unfamiliar seas� A former citizen of the GDR, he rues the prospect that his acquired knowledge and skills, once shared with others, will now become “nur noch sein Privateigentum” (15)� Conversely, he envisions his tangible property-furniture, kitchen gadgets, books-randomly relocated and dispersed once his life no longer connects them: a diaspora of things� Thus, before Richard ever encounters the refugees, his situation bears some resemblance to their plight: lack of family and meaningful work, an excess of free time, unfamiliar circumstances, and an uncertain future� 4 Yet to all this he has a simple response which stands alone as a paragraph and recalls Aschenbach’s credo: “Aber dennoch” (16)� The novel sparsely reveals some further, more intimate circumstances that Richard must carry on ‘in spite of�’ Early in the text we learn that he was unfaithful to his wife with a graduate assistant, who was unfaithful in turn and ultimately left him (10). The tale of the older professor having an affair with his TA is, however, such a hackneyed plot device that we might well be skeptical of its power to grant deep insight into Richard's character� In time, readers do learn crucial details about Richard’s past, but-remarkably-this information only surfaces on the novel’s last two pages� There we discover that Richard has borne a significant burden of guilt for most of his adult life. At his sixty-ninth birthday party, he tells everyone present that while still a student he persuaded his wife, Christel, to have a kitchen-table abortion: “[M]ir war das damals zu früh. […] Ich wollte es nur in dem Moment nicht” (347)� When his wife bled in the train on the way home, Richard found it “furchtbar peinlich” and hated her because he feared she would die (348)� Christel wanted children (something Richard never knew), yet the couple remained childless, perhaps as a result of the shoddy procedure� She was unhappy, became a drinker, and the alcohol fueled frequent fights throughout the marriage (346—47). At the outset of the novel Christel has been dead for five years (133, 346), of a cause the text never divulges. Details of the day of the abortion remain burned into Richard’s memory: at his birthday party he relates how he waited for his wife in the “Hinterhof ” in blazing heat near a row of aluminum trash cans (347)� Interestingly, the novel 582 Nancy Nobile first mentions this scene as early as Chapter 15 of its fifty-five chapters, at a point long before readers have been given the information needed to appreciate its import: “Wann hat Richard eigentlich Gottfried von Straßburg gelesen? Bevor er damals auf dem Hinterhof in der glühenden Hitze stand und wartete, dass seine Frau wieder herunterkam? Oder irgendwann in den Jahren danach? ” (84)� This day represents a rupture in Richard’s life, a turning point with a clear “bevor” and “danach,” yet an explanation of what occurred on that day remains submerged for an additional two-thirds of the novel, just as Richard carries this secret for most of his adult life until he finally lets it up into the light. The corpse in the lake, right in Richard's “Hinterhof,” serves as a recurrent reminder that something lingers beneath the surface and “meldet sich […] immer wieder aus den Abgründen von Richards Bewusstsein” (Ludewig 272)� To be sure, the body in the lake clearly evokes greater catastrophes suffered by refugees on the Mediterranean, 5 yet it is also “home-centered” (Baker 508), specific to Richard, and can thus be read as a large-scale analogue of a fetus in a womb� Like Richard's unborn child, the man who drowned might have been saved: strong young men in rowboats were nearby and saw him waving, yet they simply rowed away, either because they took it for a “Scherz" or because they had "vielleicht doch Angst, dass der Mann sie mit hinunterzieht" (12)� In other words, the potential rescuers resemble Richard at the time he rejected fatherhood - young and strong on a summer’s day - for they did not take the situation seriously enough or feared it would weigh them down� While a traditional Bildungsroman centers on the “complex inwardness” of its protagonist, in dialectic with practical social reality, 6 Gehen, ging, gegangen withholds access to the most salient event of its main character’s inner life� The novel’s final words reveal the reason for this avoidance of depth. Richard states that on the day of the abortion he realized: [D]ass das, was ich aushalte, nur die Oberfläche von all dem ist, was ich nicht aushalte. So wie auf dem Meer? , fragt Khalil. Ja, im Prinzip genauso wie auf dem Meer� (348) For Richard, as for refugees braving ocean waves, remaining on the “Oberfläche” enables survival� By avoiding depths he cannot emotionally withstand, Richard eschews what Aleida Assmann terms “Ort”: a site of deep memory where living, suffering, and trauma have already occurred. Instead, he endures by remaining within “Raum,” a future-oriented space of planning, shaping, and pragmatic action (74)� In a prior novel, Heimsuchung , Erpenbeck privileged the depths of “Ort�” She linked its most developed and sympathetic characters-those with names and lasting legacies-to the lake and the profound suffering it represents, while characters aligned with “Raum”-designated only by their occupations or social roles-pursue shallow self-interest within the ephemeral flux of political events (Nobile 66—67)� Erpenbeck inverts this emphasis in Gehen, ging, gegangen and privileges “Raum” by portraying it as a locus of survival� Although superficial, unanchored from the past and from deep emotion, it proves a site of resilience, fortitude, and unsentimental practicality� 7 A simple but striking example of this pragmatism occurs when Richard finds there is no room for the lettuce inside the refrigerator drawer and instead places it on the cool tiles of his foyer� He migrates it laterally across the house to a surface where it can survive although displaced (55)� Richard concentrates his actions along the superficies of “Raum” to withstand the emotional pain submerged in his past like a dead body in a lake� The refugees, for their part, now exist within “Raum” by default, having been violently severed from their past through forced migration and, in many cases, the murder of their families� The phrase of one of the asylum seekers - “Broke the memory”-thus proves apposite to more than just his cell phone (79)� Early in the novel, Richard likens history to a “Müllhalde,” deep with many strata: “die verschiedenen Zeiten fallen im Dunkeln, den Mund mit Erde gefüllt” (30). This metaphor of the buried past, its voice stifled by earth, indicates, by contrast, that the surface is not only a site of survival, but the site where narration can occur� This again becomes clear through the childhood history of the refugee, Awad, who was raised by his grandmother until he was seven� Despite repeated questions from Richard, Awad cannot remember her, yet the narrator recounts the old woman’s attempt to rise up from the deeps: “[D]iese inzwischen sehr alte und womöglich schon gestorbene Frau versucht […] in die Welt des Erzählbaren vorzustoßen, aber es gelingt ihr nicht, sie […] bleibt unter der trennenden Schicht und sinkt still wieder ab” (75)� As Richard’s candid admission on the novel’s final pages also illustrates, stories must emerge from the depths and break the surface in order to be told� 8 Appropriate to this imagery of silent depth and surface narratability, Richard initially overlooks the refugees, fails to see a story unfolding right in front of him, because his thoughts tarry underground� When he, like Aschenbach, takes a walk at the beginning of the novel, he does not (yet) have an encounter with “Fremdländischen und Weitherkommenden,” as does his literary predecessor ( Venedig 8), but instead walks past the ten refugees holding a hunger strike on Alexanderplatz� The narrator asks why Richard is so blind to his surroundings, and answers: “Er denkt an Rzeszów” (19)� Oblivious to what takes place on the surface of the city, Richard thinks only of the subterranean� He recalls his visit to the Polish town, beneath which labyrinthine tunnels were dug in the Middle Ages, and he also ponders the medieval catacombs beneath Alexanderplatz� Even two hours later, on his walk home, Richard overlooks the refugees because Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 583 584 Nancy Nobile he is focused on how the fountain’s terraces appear to cascade downward from the TV tower� Although the Africans display a sign announcing “Wir werden sichtbar” (23), they remain invisible to Richard, for his attention stays fixed on depth and its temporal correlate, the past� When Richard finally sees the hunger strikers on television that evening, he wonders twice why he had failed to notice them (27, 29)� Yet his interest in this issue has been piqued-“indirekt sind die Wirkungen” (34)-and when he later reads of a school in Kreuzberg occupied by refugees, he decides to attend a hearing of grievances there� All the people present introduce themselves and state their reasons for attending, but Richard says nothing� (37—38)� Back at home, he considers the motives for his reticence: Aber was geht es die Leute an, dass er da ist. Er will niemandem helfen. […] Er will einfach nur sehen, und beim Sehen in Ruhe gelassen werden. Er gehört zu keiner Gruppe, sein Interesse gehört ihm ganz allein, ist sein Privateigentum und sozusagen ganz kalt. Und wenn es nicht, sein ganzes Berufsleben über, so kalt gewesen wäre, hätte er nicht so viel verstanden. (41) Richard, like Aschenbach for most of his life, considers dispassionate objectivity essential to his profession� Until his Venetian adventure, Aschenbach had maintained a code of “Besonnenheit” and “Nüchternheit,” even guarding against the lure of the ocean, for he believed its shapeless immensity imperiled the form-giving nature of his art (77, 38)� After encountering Tadzio, he abandons this “elegante Selbstbeherrschung” (16), embraces chaos, and dies an enraptured fool� Richard, too, is a man of rules, right down to the proper way to cut an onion (24) but remains wary of emotionalism even after he has become involved with the refugees� For example, when Ithemba cooks a meal for him, Richard feels moved, but “kann sich selber nicht leiden, wenn er gerührt ist,” for he considers himself “einen Idioten” in this emotive state (204)� The narrator of Tod in Venedig tells us that as a lonely man Aschenbach is all too sensitive, prone to inflating the slightest impressions into “das Verkehrte, das Unverhältnismäßige, das Absurde” (31). Richard protects against such pitfalls of solitude through practical action taken within an ever-widening sphere of connections to others� Aschenbach gets drawn in by his adventure, his focus constricting until he perceives nothing but the fantasy spun around a single boy, whereas Richard gets drawn outward � He does not plunge willfully into his own depths like the antihero of Tod in Venedig, but instead develops in the only mode in which he can bear to proceed at all: cleaving to the surface and acting pragmatically in the here and now� Through this outward-reaching action, he evolves a new understanding of family, his responsibilities as a human being, and his place in society� By the novel’s last page Richard has become part of such a broad network of rhizomatic alliances that he can trust to its tensile strength, look into his own depths, and accept what he sees there� Before he met the refugees, Richard already had a close circle of friends, most of whom he has known for decades� However, after interacting with refugees for about six weeks (174), he begins to see his long-term friendships in a new way: während er sieht, wie Sylvia sich bei ihrem Mann Detlef einhakt, und wie Thomas einen Blick in seine Zigarettenschachtel wirft, […] denkt [Richard] in genau diesem Moment, dass auch diese vier Menschen hier, von denen er einer ist, zu einem Körper gehören. Hand, Knie, Nase, Mund, Füße, Augen, Gehirn, Rippen, Herz oder Zähne. Egal� (184) The image of Sylvia linking arms with Detlef inaugurates the dynamic of human connectivity at work in this passage, as Richard perceives himself and his friends to be parts of a single body� At the outset of the chapter in which this image occurs, he had been reading about the history of the Tuareg, starting with a cosmology in which all forms of life, despite their diversity, were interconnected, mutually reliant, and “ein einziger Körper.” Individuals in society, too, were considered “unterschiedliche Organe eines Körpers” (175). The societal interdependence Richard begins to envision here, about midway through this Bildungsroman, takes the form of a rhizome, which Deleuze and Guattari define as “alliance, uniquely alliance” (25). Growing horizontally through ramified surface extension (and thus remaining solely within what Assmann terms “Raum”), the rhizome forms a multiplicity in a constant state of becoming (7)� Since it emphasizes not what was, but what can be, the rhizome operates in a mode that “includes forgetting as a process” (16)� In the course of the novel, Richard continues to develop and to form outward connections by defying the freight of guilt not only in his own past, but in that of his country� For this reason, he feels relief that Osarobo has never heard of the Berlin Wall, of Hitler or the Holocaust, for he hopes that this “Ahnungslosigkeit” might restore Germany to a time “ vor alldem” (150)� Through connection with the refugees, Richard can entertain the notion that “Deutschland is beautiful” (150), for the rhizome is “antigeneology […] short-term memory, or antimemory” (21). Just as a rhizome may shatter at a given spot, but always starts up again (9), Richard begins new growth at age 68, saying ‘trotzdem’ to his own and his country’s history� As a “stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure,” the rhizome also deterritorializes, it creates an open map “connectible in all of its dimensions” (12)� Just prior to Richard perceiving himself and his friends as organs of a single body, the group had been discussing the opposite phenomenon: the lethal repercussions of territorialism� The nationally owned French company, Areva, with Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 585 586 Nancy Nobile its monopoly on uranium mining in Niger, ensures that plenty of energy flows in France and Germany, but causes cancer among the Tuareg and poisons their livestock (182)� In this novel, self-serving and often reckless insularity meets the countervailing force of diversified, surface proliferation across boundaries. As David Kim has noted, a sense of global interconnection is something that must be learned and, recalling the rhizome, “begins with the substitution of vertical memory cultures for a more horizontal network of hybrid identities and border-crossing communities” (11)� When Richard first encounters the refugees, he has a long way to go before he develops - and then acts on - a rhizomatic, interconnected view of human society� Initially, he reads the refugees as if they were the texts that he had been reading all his life� Like his literary antecedent, Aschenbach, Richard views the foreign through the lens of Western art� While Aschenbach sometimes renames Tadzio - e.g., “kleiner Phäake,” “Hyakinthos,” “Narziß” (36, 59, 61) - Richard extends this practice considerably. Finding it difficult to remember the real names of the refugees when writing his evening notes, Richard “verwandelt” them into those of figures familiar to him from his studies (84). The first refugee he notices when he visits Oranienplatz wears golden sneakers and thus becomes “Hermes” (44), the same god evoked by the exotic figure first encountered in Tod in Venedig : a traveller with a cape, straw hat ( petasos ), and iron-tipped cane ( caduceus ) who awakens in Aschenbach a thirst for travel (8—9)� 9 The massive Raschid becomes “der Blitzeschleuderer” (98), grief-stricken Awad becomes “Tristan,” and Rufu becomes “der Mond von Wismar” (158)� Even when Richard does not rename the refugees, he employs recurrent descriptors in the manner of Homeric epithets: Tall Ithemba is repeatedly termed “der lange Ithemba,” 10 and the slender Karon, whose real name we learn only late in the novel (249), is dubbed “der Dünne” (220, 221, 327)� The refugee who most recalls Tadzio from Tod in Venedig receives the name “Apoll” (66)� Just as a head of curls is one of young Tadzio’s most distinguishing features (32, 52), Apoll is “ein ganz Junger […] mit wilden Locken” (65) and “seine quicklebendigen Haare springen auf und ab” (158). As befits the setting of the intertext, Richard and Apoll can only converse with each other in Italian (66)� However, the choice of the name “Apoll” also underscores the novel’s main point of divergence from its intertext, for it runs distinctly counter to the Dionysian plunge central to Tod in Venedig, instead emphasizing the preservation of clarity and restraint� Initially-indeed for a good half of the novel - Richard deserves the charges of myopia and ethnocentrism some readers have leveled against him� His inability to recall the refugees’ names likely stems more from ignorance than from poor memory: “[D]ie Haare und Gesichter sind ja alle so schwarz” (93). One reader (who does acknowledge Richard’s subsequent development) creates a catalog of his flaws, finding him “nicht besonders moralisch, ein wenig sexistisch, einfältig, zerstreut und weltfremd,” an ivory-tower academic unable to reflect on his own eurocentrism (Ludewig 272—73)� Other readers are less fair, for they discern no significant change in Richard over the eight-month period covered by the novel, finding him trapped “bis zuletzt” in colonial patterns of thinking (Buchzig; also Hermes 183—84)� It is small wonder that Richard has garnered such reproach, for Erpenbeck highlights the shortcomings of her protagonist many times and from multiple perspectives� Richard attempted to domineer his TA girlfriend, demanding her to call him at exact times, wear specific items of clothing, and even walk toward their meeting places along precise trajectories (146)� A marked example of how Richard’s need for control leads him to callousness occurs during his first interview with a group of refugees, whom he initially views as little more than a “Forschungsprojekt” (56)� Before the meeting, he spent two weeks creating a questionnaire containing some relevant-but also some ridiculous-questions (51)� When Raschid and Zair tell him that their boat capsized on the Mediterranean, Richard, sticking to his script, inquires “Haben Sie eine Schule besucht? ” The refugees continue to describe how they survived the catastrophe despite their inability to swim, to which Richard responds, “Was war in der Kindheit Ihr Lieblingsversteck? ” (61)� Raschid and Zair then state twice that 500 of the 800 refugees on their boat drowned, yet Richard persists in his oblivious litany and asks if any of them knows a song (62)� Shortly later, when he learns that the Africans might be relocated to a site an hour away, he thinks only of his research project: “[D]a wirft man ihm gleich wieder Steine in den Weg” (99). One means by which Erpenbeck shows Richard’s fallibility from the perspective of other characters is through comments in his Stasi file made by one of his young colleagues, an informeller Mitarbeiter who described Richard as arrogant, unsteady in his ideological positions, and tending toward errors of judgment in matters of politics (160)� While one might dismiss this colleague’s views as doctrinaire or self-serving, Erpenbeck demonstrates Richard’s potential for faulty judgment just a few pages later� For most of the novel, Richard serves as focalizer of the omniscient narrator, but Chapter 27 shifts abruptly to the point of view of Awad; it puts readers inside the aching head of this young refugee who has been awake since 3: 30 in the morning, pacing, ruminating, and remembering war� From his perspective, Richard, who comes by to ask more questions, is “der ältere Herr, der sehr höflich ist, aber vielleicht auch verrückt” (165). While the agitated Awad thinks of his murdered father, Richard, true to form, asks him about hand lotion and about items he had packed for the relocation to Spandau, slated for that day but cancelled because of a chickenpox outbreak� A staff member requests that Awad report for a voluntary blood test to see if Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 587 588 Nancy Nobile he has antibodies to chickenpox� When Richard generically recommends this as “eine gute Sache” (167), he proves a poor advocate for the young man, as he fails to recognize that immunity to chickenpox would result in Awad’s relocation and thus his separation from the group� Awad, so rattled that he mistakes Richard for his father, initially consents to the test, yet - wisely - he ultimately flees. By casting this chapter from Awad’s perspective, Erpenbeck shows that Richard cannot yet be relied upon when in loco parentis � By the end of the novel, however, Awad is one of the twelve men - an extended family of surrogate sons and grandsons - with whom Richard shares his home (337)� Richard also views Apoll in paternal terms, thinking when he first sees him that the young man could be his grandson (66)� He regards Osarobo, too, in a fatherly way, feeling sudden shame that he had bought him a portable keyboard so he might earn money on the street, but would never have considered such a prospect for a son of his own (216, 296)� Although he is only dimly conscious of this motive, aiding the refugees offers Richard-a man who once rejected fatherhood-opportunity to redress his past by helping to establish a decent life for these traumatized, despairing young men: it seems to him “als hinge für ihn selbst etwas davon ab, dass er den [Osarobo] wieder ins Leben zurückholt, als verlöre er selbst irgend etwas, wenn dieser Junge aus Niger, den er kaum kennt, sich aufgibt” (127)� Beyond this vaguely sensed personal stake, helping the asylum seekers may enable continued Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung for Richard’s whole country� Only if the refugees survive Germany, he muses, will Hitler truly have lost the war (64)� As is a distinguishing feature of the Bildungsroman genre, Richard’s potential for individual development has a wider, societal correlate; what proves possible for him, despite his flaws, could prove possible for his flawed country as well. 11 Erpenbeck underscores the parallel between individual and nation by creating a protagonist close in age to the country in which he lives. Born “ganz am Ende des Krieges” (91), Richard is about four years older than the BRD� One of the first significant milestones in Richard’s development is an episode in which he feels severed from his former life, an experiential caesura also prominent in Tod in Venedig , and both episodes conclude with an act of writing� At the Wendepunkt of Mann’s novella, Aschenbach reluctantly decides to leave Venice, but rejoices when a baggage mixup, which he sees as “Schicksal,” requires him to return (47)� Thereafter he perceives himself to have been transported, irrevocably, to the sole place that makes him happy, a “mythic realm on the other side of everyday reality” (Koelb 101). 12 Aschenbach recalls his home and the rigors of his career but feels severed from them: “entrückt ins elysische Land’ (50), entered into a “heilig entstellte Welt,” with his days “mythisch verwandelt” (58)� For Richard, this caesura takes the form of an oneiric, almost ghostly experience, and not a happy one� He awakens in the middle of the night-or thinks he awakens - and walks through his dark house, room by room, “als gehöre er selbst schon nicht mehr dazu” (115). His life suddenly seems “vollkommen fremd” to him, “vollkommen unbekannt, wie eine sehr weit entfernte Galaxie�” He then sits down and sobs “wie ein Verbannter�” Though Richard feels mystified in the morning, events of the prior day reveal what had triggered his sense of severance from life� On that day, Richard spent two hours listening to Raschid tell the story of his childhood and youth, both men sitting in a tiny storeroom which security guards had unlocked so they could have privacy� 13 Raschid related how, thirteen years prior, much of his family of origin had been slain, and his house and workplace in Nigeria burned to the ground: Wie mit einem Schnitt wurde unser Leben in dieser Nacht einfach von uns abgeschnitten� Cut, sagt Raschid� Cut� (114) Richard’s waking dream of loss and alienation partakes, empathetically, in the caesura experienced by Raschid� 14 As the phrase “als gehöre er selbst schon nicht mehr dazu” indicates, it also serves as a memento mori, and thus as a spur to action� After experiencing a break with their prior lives, both characters put pen to paper� Aschenbach feels a sudden urge to write and authors the last work he will ever create (55)� Throwing all objectivity to the winds, he merges the act of writing with an act of voyeurism, composing “anderthalb Seiten erlesener Prosa” while in mental “Verkehr” with Tadzio’s body� 15 Richard, for his part, ponders for a while when writing his evening notes and distills Raschid’s twohour account to twelve utterly dispassionate words describing the man’s life before its tragic rupture: “ Es gab eine Kindheit. Es gab einen Alltag. Es gab eine Jugend ” (115)� As the chapter closes, these words remain illuminated by Richard’s writing lamp, long after he has left the desk, as if spotlit on a stage (116)� It is here, so to speak, that Richard’s “Forschungsprojekt” takes its final bow, for the novel never mentions it again� Though Richard continues to read about African cultures (176), he ceases to write and instead begins both to take action and to share stories of the refugees with his friends� From this point forward, the refugees begin to inhabit his life, not his notes� As the next chapter opens, Erpenbeck highlights this change in Richard by means of friends who are unaware it has occurred� When Richard meets Sylvia at the market, she immediately asks, “Du schreibst sicher, musst Vorträge halten? ” (116). “Nicht direkt,” he answers, “aber das sei eine längere Geschichte.” Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 589 590 Nancy Nobile Sylvia invites him home for lunch where her husband Detlev’s first question is “Woran arbeitest du denn gerade? ” (116)� Rather than describing research, however, Richard speaks at length about the lives of the asylum seekers and the challenges they face, much of which is new information to his friends� He thereby connects-rhizomelike-his longtime alliances to his newly-made ones� As Richard shares their stories, the refugees find a virtual place in Sylvia and Detlev’s home: “Apoll, Tristan und der Olympier bekommen nun ihren Platz in einem deutschen Wohnzimmer mit Couchecke, Fernseher, Obstschale und Bücherregal” (117)� By trading a writing project for a lived experience - one then shared through narration - Richard here initiates a process that ramifies outward, until, by novel’s end, three refugees find an actual home with Detlev and Sylvia (333). Another refugee finds lodging with Detlev’s ex-wife, and, through other friends, these rhizomatic linkages form offshoots in all directions. Just as a rhizome is “defined solely by a circulation of states” ( Plateaus 21), the three friends eating a meal in this scene realize that their comfortable situation could easily be “umgekehrt,” a thought which opens its “Maul weit auf und zeigt seine grässlichen Zähne” (120). And just as the rhizome’s horizontal structure precludes hierarchies, the friends here recognize that their security and well-being are not a “Verdienst” that puts them above the refugees� After this recognition, Richard begins to invite some asylum seekers to his home rather than merely visiting them at the Altersheim. This first happens in imagination as “der Dünne” ghosts through Richard’s house at night, talking, sweeping, and following him from room to room (141—43)� Visits soon become real when Richard begins to give piano lessons to Osarobo, finding a rhizomatic kind of happiness in his mere proximity, a “ Glück des Paralleluniversums ” (152)� He then invites Rufu to lunch (162), and hires Apoll to do yard work for him (173, 188)� Six weeks after the fact, Richard now grows angry at the Altersheim director who had warned him, for no specific reason, never to invite refugees to his home (174)� As will be shown, this incipient development accelerates markedly after three chapters containing themes and images saturated by death� The same focus also accelerates Tod in Venedig toward its climax. Mann devotes a full fifth of the novella to the cholera outbreak, word of which escalates from rumors, to German newspaper reports, to denials by Venetian authorities, until Aschenbach finally hears the “Wahrheit” that the pandemic has spread from Asia to Europe, killing eighty percent of its victims (74—77). Rather than fleeing Venice or warning Tadzio’s family, Aschenbach welcomes dissolution: “Was galt ihm noch Kunst und Tugend gegenüber den Vorteilen des Chaos? ” (78)� Immediately thereafter, he has a dream in which he joins an atavistic, ululating horde gathering orgiastically around a symbol of Dionysos (78—80)� Erpenbeck, too, depicts a procession: the group of refugees that gathers-adorned with make-up, scarves, gilded chains, strings of beads-for the relocation to Spandau� When this “festliche Prozession” sets forth, Erpenbeck gives its description a surrealistic twist: Häuptlinge und Prinzen mit stolzem Blick, […] wippende Pfauenfedern auf dem Kopf, in schimmernde Gewänder gehüllt, verlassen den glänzenden Palast, Freudentriller erfüllen die Luft, das Tor öffnet sich wie von Zauberhand, zahme Antilopen und ein Einhorn schließen sich der Delegation an, den Abschluss des Zuges aber bilden drei weiße Elefanten� (191) While Aschenbach’s dream reveals his basest nature, the refugees’ procession reveals their most elevated selves: dignified, joyous, even regal. In a further inversion, “das obzöne Symbol” from Aschenbach’s nightmare finds a playful echo in the unicorn� After Aschenbach’s dream, Tod in Venedig plunges swiftly to its lethal conclusion� Similarly-though she will pull back from this nosedive-Erpenbeck devotes Chapters 34 through 36 to a conspicuous focus on death, in a chain of more than twenty references, many of which concern drowning or plunging into depths� A question from Zair about the number of Richard’s offspring forms the prelude to this topic, touching on a sore spot in Richard’s past, of which readers are not yet aware� Upon learning that Richard is childless, Zair expresses condolences “in einem Ton, als sei jemand gestorben” (204)� Though the refugees like their new lodgings in Spandau, each time Richard visits he cannot help but think “Aus einem zweistöckigen Gebäude kann sich kein Verzweifelter zu Tode stürzen” (205)� Much of Chapter 34 takes place on Totensonntag. When Richard explains the holiday to Khalil, the young man’s cheerful expression transforms to that of someone “der die Flucht über ein Meer hinter sich hat und nicht weiß, ob seine Eltern noch leben” and brings to Richard’s mind the increasing reports of capsized boats on the Mediterranean (206)� Appropriate to the intertext of this novel, Italy’s beaches are sites of death: “An den Stränden Italiens werden […] beinahe täglich Leichen von afrikanischen Flüchtlingen angespült.” Osarobo sees a news report of a shipwreck, “und in den Ertrinkenden sich selbst erkannt, seine Freunde und die, die neben ihm gesessen hatten” (207)� This, in turn, prompts Richard to recall a phrase from Eugen Leviné-“ Tote auf Urlaub ”-words that could form an alternate title for Tod in Venedig � Chapter 34 ends at the gravesite of Richard’s parents with the reminder “ dass auch unser Fleisch eines Tages zu Staub wird ” (209)� The sense of impending doom created by the cholera pandemic in Tod in Venedig finds an echo in Chapters 35 and 36 as the refugees gradually receive appointments for interviews that will determine their fates� Unless they can make their case to authorities under orders to proceed “mit aller Härte” (210), Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 591 592 Nancy Nobile the stipulations of Dublin II will force a dreaded outcome: return to Italy, the very place-“halb Märchen, halb Fremdenfalle”-that Aschenbach so wantonly embraces ( Venedig 65)� One refugee, Zani, procures newspaper articles to document incidents in his hometown: “ Massacre ,” Richard reads on these pages, “ Massacre, Massacre ” (212). Khalil, who cannot write well, draws pictures to illustrate the stages of his flight: “[e]in Boot, das wie eine sehr dünne Mondsichel aussieht, darunter viel Wasser” (212)� Richard recalls this drawing shortly later: “Ein Boot, wie eine Mondsichel, flach, und darunter sehr, sehr viel Wasser” (220). With this boat shaped like a crescent moon, Erpenbeck presents readers with the image of a gondola� She thus evokes the Venetian intertext of her novel in a way that emphasizes the profound depths beneath the thin, insubstantial vessel, depths that by no means present an enticement, as they do for Aschenbach� Just beneath this fragile conveyance yawns the place where the corpses are: “Unter Wasser habe ich all die Leichen gesehen,” relates Raschid, who had fled on a boat that suddenly capsized, drowning hundreds within minutes, including his five-year-old daughter and his son, not yet three (240). In order to survive, the refugees had to remain on the surface, above the “Trennlinie zwischen Geistern und Menschen” which, like the boat, is “sehr dünn” (274)� Once on land, they must then resist sinking psychologically and drowning in memories of depths populated by the dead� Erpenbeck illustrates their resilience by bringing the three chapters on death to an abrupt end� When Richard asks how burial takes place in the desert, his question gets stifled by a siren, murderously loud, that begins to blare as if on cue from an unseen theater director (214). Staff members triggered the siren as a lesson to residents for leaving the stove on, but the refugees-well acquainted with real disaster, including air raids (215, 238) - cannot be fazed by a false alarm� Yaya squelches the fake emergency by cutting the wire� Zair, still in bed, returns to his nap, and Ithemba puts the kettle on for tea� In Tod in Venedig, the extensive section on cholera heralds Aschenbach’s irreversible dive into ruin� For about one month of narrated time, 16 Erpenbeck, too, submerges her characters in the melancholic depths of “Ort,” yet she does not let them linger there� She summarily severs the topic of death, as if cutting a wire, and returns her characters to the day-to-day routine of “Raum�” And here her novel takes leave of its intertext� Erpenbeck rejects the egocentric, self-indulgent slide into chaos depicted in Mann’s novella by presenting characters who resist that siren song� Far from questioning “whether the world can be understood through literature,” as Sophie Salvo argues (351), and “drawing our attention away from […] fictional worlds” because they fail to foster effective political action (356, 353), Erpenbeck revivifies a century-old text and lends it fresh relevance for the present. By recalling Aschenbach on the Lido, she offers a cautionary example of insularity: the tale of a man who proceeds from the “triumphant perfection of inwardness” to a “completely internalized” love affair, and thus never connects to “the real and independent existence of another human being” (Braverman 289, 293)� Mann’s anti-hero forms a subliminal counterpoint to Richard, whose outward reach despite inward pain gives new and politically-potent meaning to Aschenbach’s “Heroismus der Schwäche” (17). In Cosmopolitan Parables, David Lee posits that melancholy narratives need not be debilitating, but can instead mobilize a sense of “collective responsibility” and “common struggles at a global scale” (18—19)� The month spent pondering death clearly motivates Richard, for immediately thereafter he realizes that his efforts to help the refugees have thus far been meager. Once a man with “großen Hoffnungen für die Menschheit,” he now sees himself as an “Almosengeber” and wonders when this change occurred: “Sicher nicht gleich mit dem Mauerfall, aber irgendwann danach, irgendwann unterwegs ist er eingeknickt und versucht nun im Kleinen, wie man so sagt, hier und da, wo es halt möglich ist, das eine oder das andere Gute zu tun” (217)� The form of this sentence mirrors its content, for it trickles out, in short stingy clauses, as if wrested from a miser� This recognition prompts Richard to intensify his efforts: he invites Raschid for Christmas dinner and gives him a winter jacket (234); gives Osarobo 60€ for a Monatskarte (247); buys sweaters for Raschid, Apoll, and Ithemba (248); advocates vociferously for Karon at the police station (251); spends €3,000 to acquire land for Karon’s family in Ghana (253, 277); helps to organize a demonstration (266); and brings Rufu to the dentist, saving him from agony and misprescribed psychoactive drugs (283—91)� Richard’s connection to the Africans does not merely consist of one-way generosity but becomes increasingly reciprocal� They often share home-cooked meals with him, and when Raschid visits on Christmas Eve, Richard recognizes the story he tells as “ein Geschenk” (237). The first time Raschid attempted to tell of his flight from Libya, Richard interrupted with queries from his silly questionnaire, yet he now sits silently, stock-still, as this narrative gift is bestowed (237)� Preparing for Raschid’s Christmas visit caused Richard to go into his cellar to bring up boxes of ornaments he had not touched since his wife’s death and would never again have unearthed were he not hosting Raschid� His thoughts as he decorates the house show that this descent to the basement, repository of long-unaccessed memories, has a psychological analogue: All diese Handgriffe kennt er noch gut, diese Handgriffe, die er sonst nie wieder getan hätte, sind ihm erschreckend vertraut. Was alles mag da wohl noch im Dunkel seines Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 593 Gedächtnisses warten, aber nie wieder aus der Abstellkammer hervorgeholt werden, bevor der Laden irgendwann endgültig zugemacht wird? (231) Here, about two-thirds into the novel, Richard exhumes parts of his past and shows himself nearly ready for his final action in the narrative: facing and sharing memories that are even more deeply buried� Richard’s links to the refugees not only have an increasingly powerful influence on him, but expand in scope, now reaching all the way to Ghana� These connections often move along invisible networks, as was the case when 3,000€ in cash for land in West Africa was thrown down a fissure in a Berlin floor, moved five thousand miles via phone calls and code numbers, and emerged the same day as Ghanaian Cedi to finalize the sale (280—82). Similarly, the refugees, who once rode treacherous waves, now find a home along “Funkwellen” of the internet and their cellphones, a “Netz aus Zahlen und Kennwörtern” that spans continents (220)� This network forms a rhizome: rootless, deterritorialized, an interconnected diaspora� 17 The refugees create an extended family, though one constituted by alliance, not filiation. While the precarity of their situation impels the refugees to form alternative familial ties, 18 the law-arbitrary yet “ehern” - refuses to recognize them as binding (228)� The novel shows that family structures have undergone pragmatic transformations even for Richard’s German friends, 19 but bonds formed by those whose stay in Germany has not been sanctioned have little defense against the predations of the law: “Das Gesetz frisst heute zum Abendbrot Hand, Knie, Nase, Mund, Füße, Augen, Gehirn, Rippen, Herz oder Zähne. Egal” (228). These same words were used to describe Richard’s sense that he and his German friends formed parts of a single body (184), but now this body is far larger, more heterogeneous, and brings to mind the “Weltgemeinschaft” Erpenbeck described in her 2016 speech accepting the Thomas-Mann-Preis : Bei allen diesen Überlegungen sind wir ganz zentral mit dem Nachdenken über Grenzen konfrontiert� Und zwar nicht nur über die Grenzen zwischen dem einen Land und dem andern […], sondern vor allem über die Grenzen in uns selbst. Zwischen uns als egoistischen Einzelwesen und uns als Mitgliedern einer Gemeinschaft, in der einer auf den anderen angewiesen ist, und die bei der heutigen ökonomischen und ökologischen Verbundenheit sinnvoll nur als Weltgemeinschaft gedacht werden kann� ( Kein Roman 211) The interconnectedness described above could be construed as moral cosmopolitanism-shared values that cut across race, nationality, or creed (Taberner 44)- but Gehen, ging, gegangen gives it tangible, somatic form; it presents humankind 594 Nancy Nobile as manifold parts of a single organism, one that traverses borders and crosses oceans, yet must continually regenerate under threat of dismemberment� In the end, Richard will do his best to say “trotzdem” to the threat posed by the law, but first must receive a final catalyst to his development. This impetus comes from the eighteen-year-old Osarobo, whose fate causes Richard a profound grief unprecedented for him in this narrative. Unable to find work, Osarobo burglarized Richard’s house� Richard’s sorrow does not stem from the theft itself-he has no intention to prosecute (317)-but from Osarobo’s choice to sever all contact rather than admit his actions� By choosing avoidance over candor and trust, he ostracizes himself, forfeits community, even breaks a social contract: Osarobo’s soul, Richard knows, “fliegt jetzt […] wo es keine Regeln mehr gibt, wo man auf niemanden Rücksicht nehmen muss, aber dafür auch für immer und ganz und gar und unumkehrbar allein ist” (323)� Richard weeps as he has not done since the death of his wife, for the young man’s choice not only bolsters the expectations of racists (323) but destroys the man Osarobo might otherwise have become� Despite repeated attempts, Richard proves unable to summon Osarobo back from self-banishment, yet the loss of this young man impels him to shield as many other refugees as he can. When the threat posed by the law finally materializes as deportation orders, Richard acts on his rhizomatic view of society and converts every human-sized horizontal space in his home into a place for a refugee to sleep� He takes in twelve of them, and his actions form part of a network branching outward in multiple directions� Richard’s friends - and friends of those friends - provide lodging for at least eleven refugees, while other individuals and organizations help 106 of the men facing deportation� In sum, this ramified network assists about thirty percent of the Africans seeking asylum in Berlin� While Richard’s actions provide a model for “gelungenes Menschsein,” 20 they also lend the text a utopian element typical of the Bildungsroman, a genre that “esteems possibilities as much as actualities” (Swales 23) and “can never entirely abolish the conflict between what is and what should be” (Boes 22). Although marriage is the most frequent telos of a conventional Bildungsroman hero, Franco Moretti argues that marriage merely serves as metaphor for “a possible social pact” achievable in other domains as well (24)� His description of the hero’s primary goal recalls the rhizome, for it consists of “opening up to the outside ,” creating “an ever wider and thicker network of external relationships,” and “strengthening one’s sense of belonging to a wider community” (18—19, original italics)� The arrival point of a Bildungsroman protagonist thus lies neither in the depths of a personal relationship nor in the cool objectivity of professionalism. Instead, “it is a question […] of instituting-midway between the intimate Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 595 596 Nancy Nobile and the public sphere-the reassuring atmosphere of ‘familiarity’” (24)� In the penultimate scene of her novel, Erpenbeck vividly illustrates such familiarity, as Richard and his twelve new housemates share an African meal, each tearing pieces from a mound of bread and dipping them into a communal stew (338)� By contrast, Osarobo, who sends a noncommittal text message, now has a profile picture of a kitchen table with four empty chairs. Losing Osarobo not only reinforces Richard’s alliance with other refugees, but enables him, finally, to confront his own depths� Since he thought of Osarobo in paternal terms (216, 296), losing this young man recalls the abortion, submerged in his past� Fittingly, when Richard had discussed the theft with Anne on the telephone, their conversation was infused with sounds that evoked the lake and the drowning man: Anne was washing dishes while they talked, and Richard could hear flowing water and repeated chuffs of air as she blew hair from her face. Unlike the drowning, however, and the potential rescuers who either failed to take it seriously or saw it as a threat, Anne insisted that Richard face up to Osarobo, even make a scene, “weil du ihn ernst nehmen musst” (317)� Richard is given no opportunity to confront Osarobo, yet taking such loss seriously leads him to speak candidly about the abortion to the many friends assembled at his birthday party, an action that marks the arrival point of this Bildungsroman� As Awad had already told him at the outset of this developmental journey, “wenn jemand irgendwo ankommen wolle, dürfe er nichts verbergen” (73). Though Richard’s listeners pose some questions, they also offer unequivocal support: “Verstehe. […] Verstehe. […] Das kann ich verstehen” (347—48). Similarly, when Detlev utters one of the “ganz schweren Sätze im Leben eines Menschen” and tells of Sylvia’s cancer relapse (343), this weight, too, is shared by the group� In ten successive sentences that begin with “Ein Mann denkt,” a man recalls a woman he has loved and lost� Like a rhizome, the men at the party are designated by the indefinite article, thereby emphasizing their position within a larger whole� 21 The list of individual memories thus concludes with “Alle miteinander denken […]” (344). Even Raschid, who had claimed to be inconsolable, finds some relief at the gathering, swinging a lantern and exclaiming “Wie in Afrika! ” (340, 342)� By novel’s end, when people ask Ithemba how he is doing, he replies “A little bit good” (337)� Gehen, ging, gegangen does not reach a ‘happy end,’ but one in which wide-reaching rhizomatic alliances provide the concatenated strength needed to keep from sinking under the weight of pain, loss, error, and regret� Fittingly, the lake, though still harboring a corpse, no longer horrifies Richard, for he now takes a wider view of it, one that includes the decades he has lived near its banks, the life forms it nourishes, and the changing beauty it offers each season: “Der See wird für immer der See bleiben, in dem jemand gestorben ist, und dennoch für immer auch ein sehr schöner See sein” (340). Richard thus ends his adventure as he began it-with a “dennoch”-yet one that now encompasses his whole past and has powerfully reshaped the future� Notes 1 Jed Esty traces a trend of arrested development in modernist Bildungsromane� He uses the term “ un becoming” (1) to describe the process Hans Castorp undergoes in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, yet it applies equally well to Aschenbach in Tod in Venedig. 2 The novel begins in (August) 2013� This is clear from the fact that the Oranienplatz refugee protest, which began in 2012, is said to have been in process for one year (33). Since Richard was born “ganz am Ende des Krieges” (91), he must be sixty-eight years old when the novel begins� The narrative concludes on his sixty-ninth birthday in what is likely March because “die ersten warmen Tage” have arrived (333)� The novel thus spans eight months� 3 Hannah Lühmann terms the novel a “nach der Rente ansetzenden Bildungsroman�” Cf� also Baker, who sees a “ Bildungsroman quality to Richard’s role in this story, as […] he comes of age as a global citizen” (509). 4 In an interview for the Berliner Zeitung, Erpenbeck said of Richard: “Mir war es wichtig, jemanden zu haben, der die Erfahrung des Umbruchs teilt, der wie die Flüchtlinge auf sich selbst zurückgeworfen ist” (Geißler)� 5 Cf. Baker 508, Salvo 356, and Shafi 200. 6 Swales 6� Cf� also Jacobs 16—23, Minden 34—36, and Sorg 21—29� 7 On the importance of improvisation and pragmatism for this novel, cf. Shafi 186, 200—201� 8 Erpenbeck’s remarks from a lecture given while she was writing the novel are relevant to its imagery of surface and depth: “Was wissen wir denn schon über die schwammigen Seeungeheuer, die vielleicht seit zweihundert Jahren ihren Leib in irgendeine finstere Tiefe irgendeines Ozeans pressen? Über die wissen wir nicht viel, und über andere Menschen wissen wir auch nur das, was an der Oberfläche treibt” (“Über das Erzählen” 16). 9 An allusion to Hermes also closes the novella, when the dying Aschenbach sees Tadzio as as a “bleiche[n] und liebliche[n] Psychagog” (Hermes Psychopompos) beckoning to him (87)� 10 60, 197, 204, 215, 283, 303, 327, 332� 11 Cf� Boes, who describes the Bildungsroman as a “national allegory,” evincing a “homology between purely personal formation and the development of the world at large�” In this genre, “the idealized shape of the nation comes Rhizomatic Alliance in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen 597 598 Nancy Nobile into being through the essentially arbitrary vessel of an individual life” (1920). For a similar view, cf. Esty 26. Karl Morgenstern, who first elucidated the genre, saw its hero as an embodiment of his age and his development as a reflection of a collective destiny (Boes 52, 59—60). 12 Cf. also Robertson: “At first Aschenbach simply draws on his classical education for suitable quotations. […]. Once Aschenbach has yielded to his passion, however, the surrounding world is subjectively transfigured into mythic grandeur” (103)� 13 In what is likely a nod to the homoeroticism in Tod in Venedig , the two security guards smirk when Richard and Raschid exit the storeroom and remark on the length of their “Gespräch” (114). 14 Cf� Stone, section 5, for a lengthy discussion of the role of empathy in this novel� In its conclusion, she argues that Erpenbeck’s choice to create a “flawed and fallible” main character makes it easier for a “(fallible) German public” to identify with him� 15 Cohn terms this “a pivotal scene” in which Aschenbach “breaks the aesthetic credo to which he had dedicated his working life” (137, 140)� She also argues that the narration here becomes “discordant,” for the narrator, who had thus far praised Aschenbach, now expresses “sententious judgment” (137)� Reed, on the other hand, describes the writing scene as a “transcendent” communion with the Platonic ideal of beauty and is surprised by the narrator’s “jaundiced” comments on it (56)� He does note, however, that Aschenbach feels “debauched” rather than “elevated,” by this act of writing (83)� 16 The time spanned by Chapters 34 through 36 begins two weeks before Totensonntag (205) and ends during the week “vor dem dritten Advent” (215)� 17 “There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another” (Delueze/ Guattari 9)� 18 Cf� Baer on how precarity can engender “new subjectivities, new socialities,” and “new social formations” (163)� 19 For example, Detlev and Sylvia are sanguine about spending Christmas with Detlev’s first wife and her new family: “ist doch alles schon lange her,” says Sylvia matter-of-factly (228)� Another of Richard’s friends, Peter, has a twenty-year-old girlfriend, decades younger than he, but here too pragmatism prevails: “Die Hauptsache ist doch, dass ihr beide euch gut versteht” (244)� 20 Granzin� Cf� also Lühmann, who describes this novel as a “Lehrstück über die Welt, wie sie sein könnte.” 21 “ Flat multiplicities of n dimensions are asignifying and asubjective� They are designated by indefinite articles, or rather by partitives ( some couchgrass, some of a rhizome…)” (Delueze/ Guattari 9, original italics). 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