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Narrative and Empathy: the 2015 'Refugee Crisis' in Vladimir Vertlib's Viktor Hilft and Olga Grjasnowa's Gott Ist Ni

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Narrative and Empathy: the 2015 'Refugee Crisis' in Vladimir Vertlib's Viktor Hilft and Olga Grjasnowa's Gott Ist Ni German Life and Letters 74:2 April 2021 0016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online) NARRATIVE AND EMPATHY: THE 2015 ‘REFUGEE CRISIS’ IN VLADIMIR VERTLIB’S VIKTOR HILFT AND OLGA GRJASNOWA’S GOTT IST NICHT SCHÜCHTERN Stuart Taberner (University of Leeds*) ABSTRACT This article examines Vladimir Vertlib’s Viktor hilft (2018) and Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017) in relation to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and specifically the disillusionment of humanitarianism that has become evident in recent years following the war on terror, the 2008 economic crisis, the rise of popularism, and the rapid explosion of humanitarian need. In the main body of the article, it is argued that both novels engage critically with the long-established motif of empathy as a foundation for humanitarian action, but that only Gott ist nicht schüchtern points to a way out of the disillusionment of humanitarianism by relativising European perspectives on the suffering of others (including repeated references to the Holocaust) and by encouraging the reader to think and act politically. Concretely, this means that the reader should focus on the political and moral responsibility of the state even towards non-citizens and should agitate for the state’s adherence to international conventions (e.g. the right to asylum). At the close of the article, Hannah Arendt is invoked, as is a possible definition of ‘ironic solidarity’ in literary texts dealing with the suffering of others. Dieser Artikel untersucht Vladimir Vertlibs Viktor hilft (2018) und Olga Grjasnowas Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017) in Bezug auf die Flüchtlingskrise von 2015 und spezifisch auf die Ernüchterung des Humanitarismus, die infolge des Krieges gegen den Terror, der Wirtschaftskrise von 2008, des Aufstiegs des Populismus und des rapide steigenden humanitären Bedarfs in Erscheinung getreten ist. Im Hauptteil des Artikels wird argumentiert, dass sich beide Romane – von zwei ansonsten sehr verschiedenen Autoren mit sowjetisch-jüdischem Hintergrund – kritisch mit dem längst etablierten Motiv der Empathie als Grundlage für das humanitäre Handeln auseinandersetzen. Darüber hinaus bietet Gott ist nicht schüchtern aber auch einen möglichen Ausweg aus der Ernüchterung des Humanitarismus, indem der Roman die europäische Perspektive (inklusive wiederholter Verweise auf den Holocaust) auf das Leid fremder Menschen relativiert und den Leser dazu auffordert, anstatt von Empathie geleitet zu werden politisch zu denken und zu handeln. Konkret bedeutet dies, dass der Leser auf die politische und moralische Verantwortung westlicher Staaten auch gegenüber Nichtbürgern fokussieren und sich für die Befolgung konventionsrechtlicher Verpflichtungen mobilisieren soll. Im Schlussteil des Artikels wird auf Hannah Arendt hingewiesen sowie auf eine * The author is a Research Associate in the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch; German and French, at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He is grateful for financial support on this project. © 2021 The Authors German Life and Letters published by Editorial Board and John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 248 STUART TABERNER mögliche Definition einer ‘ironic solidarity’ in literarischen Texten, die fremdes Leid thematisieren. From Adam Smith and David Hume to John Rawls, Richard Rorty, and Michael Slote (or in the continental tradition, Johann Gottfried Herder, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein), western philosophers have debated the proposition that empathy is both a universal expression of our shared humanity and a catalyst for humanitarian action on behalf of ‘distant others’.1 In such discussions and even more so in popular understandings of empathy, narrative seems especially important. From the eighteenth-century abolitionist movement to twentieth-century genocides and the conflict and climate- change refugees of the present day, story-telling is thought to provide privileged access to the ‘authentic experience’ of victims that, once told, can adumbrate realities that are otherwise too overwhelming or too abstract to grasp.2 Empathy becomes possible when the scale and savagery of forced displacement, mass rape, or genocide are focalised through the experience of a single person or handful of people. Yet the role of narrative in mobilising empathy is not unproblematic, of course – and empathy may in any event be a flimsy foundation for altruism. On the one hand, the ‘humanitarian interventionism’ of the 1990s,3 the hubris of the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s, and, more generally after 9/11, the fusing of humanitarianism and national security interests,4 are contemporary reminders that western states in particular have long used the language of empathy – aiding hapless victims, deposing dictators, and promoting human rights – to justify their global entanglements. On the other hand, when well-meaning humanitarians tell the stories of foreigners exposed to conflict or natural disasters, asylum seekers, or refugees, they may unwittingly frame them as being without agency or even individuality. Similarly, it is clear that we have empathy most readily with those who appear most likeable or deserving – children, mothers, and other ‘innocents’ – and those whose stories fulfil expectations, or even legal criteria. Psychologist Paul Bloom raises these and other concerns in his 2016 Against Empathy: The Case 1 See Heidi Maibom (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy, London 2017, especially part II, ‘History of Empathy’. 2 See James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, Cambridge, MA 2007. See also Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (eds), Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, Cambridge 2008. 3 See Beate Jahn, Liberal Internationalism: Theory, History, Practice, Basingstoke 2013. In Brendan SimmsandD.J.B.Trim(eds),Humanitarian Intervention: A History, Cambridge 2011, various chapters contextualise the liberal interventionism of the 1990s with examples from the early-modern period and the age of European empires, as well as from the United States and other non-European arenas. 4 See Stephen Brown and Jörn Grävingholt (eds), The Securitization of Foreign Aid, Basingstoke 2016. © 2021 The Authors German Life and Letters published by Editorial Board and John Wiley & Sons Ltd NARRATIVE AND EMPATHY 249 for Rational Compassion (2016), but in truth the debate on both the righteousness and practical use of stories designed to provoke empathy has been ongoing since at least the simultaneous emergence of the novel and humanitarian discourses in the eighteenth century.5 In her Empathy and the Novel, Victorianist Suzanne Keen responds to the general presumption that literary works can heighten empathetic sensibilities with a laconic ‘Well, it depends’.6 This article examines two recent German novels focused on the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015, when 1 to 2 million people fled conflict in Syria, the Horn of Africa, and Afghanistan.7 Vladimir Vertlib’s Viktor hilft (2018), it is argued, critiques the European novelistic tradition to which it belongs – hinting at the self-absorption of its privileged Austrian protagonist – but ultimately fails to elaborate a more robust basis for humanitarian action to substitute for a flawed empathy. Olga Grjasnowa’s Gott ist nicht schüchtern (2017; City of Jasmine, 2019), in contrast, gestures towards a revitalisation of humanitarianism that relies less on empathy than on legal frameworks and states’ obligations under international conventions. Moreover, both Vertlib and Grjasnowa are Jewish migrants from the former Soviet Union, who allude to the historical memory of the Holocaust and their own lived experiences of dislocation. This adds a further layer of complexity to the novels, as will be discussed. It also suggests a model for Grjasnowa’s detached, unsentimental narration in German-Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt’s deliberately dispassionate insistence on rights rather than emotions. VLADIMIR VERTLIB’S VIKTOR HILFT Vladimir Vertlib is a multiple migrant of Russian-Jewish background. Born in Leningrad in 1966, the son of a refusnik, Vertlib moved with his parents to Israel, next to Austria, Italy and Austria again, then to Italy (again), the Netherlands, and Israel, after that to the United States and back to Austria, where he became a citizen in 1986. The initial focus of his work was autobiographical. Abschiebung (1995) and Zwischenstationen (1993) are based on his family’s travels.8 In subsequent texts, Vertlib focuses on Jews in contemporary Germany. Letzter Wunsch (2003), for example, tells of a woman who is not ‘Jewish enough’ to be buried according to Jewish 5 See Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York 2007. See also Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law, New York 2007. 6 Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel, New York 2007, p. xix. 7 It is difficult to be precise, of course. FRONTEX recorded 1,802,267 border crossings for 2015, but that may include a number of multiple attempts by the same people. See https://frontex.europa.eu/ along-eu-borders/migratory-map/(accessed 30 October 2018). 8 See Dagmar Lorenz, ‘Vladimir Vertlib, a Global Intellectual: Exile, Migration, and Individualism in The Narratives of a Russian Jewish Author in Austria’, in Todd C. Hanlin
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