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Chapter 50
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Go, Went, Gone, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Refugee Crisis and Bureaucracy
Compassion and Human Connection
Racism and Prejudice
The Power and Limitations of Language
Summary
Analysis
Richard accompanies Ithemba to a meeting with Ithemba’s lawyer. Richard humors the lawyer’s jokes about the law, while Ithemba sits silently, not understanding a word the two old men are saying. The lawyer flips through Ithemba’s file and lays out the many legal hoops Ithemba must jump through to even be allowed to apply for permission to work in the country. He can only be considered for a job that no German or European wants. The process can take months.
This scene with Ithemba’s lawyer describes at tediously great length all the legal mechanisms in place that bar Ithemba from achieving residency and stability in Germany. This further shows how bureaucracy effectively sets refugees up for failure before they have a chance to make a case for themselves. It also shows how language can be used as a tool of oppression and exclusion.
Active
Themes
The lawyer asks if Richard has read the Berlin Senate’s declaration, which was released in the paper yesterday. Richard hasn’t. The lawyer reads aloud the declaration, which states that granting residency to participants in the protest movement at Oranienplatz would not be in the country’s best interest. The lawyer tells Richard that the more “developed” a society is, the more its laws fail to uphold “common sense.”
The lawyer’s remark that a society’s “common sense” diminishes the more “developed” the society becomes seems to suggest that as societies gain more power and wealth, their laws start to change to protect abstract ideals (like nationalism, for instance) over the welfare of people. A society’s government will actually go out of its way to uphold abstract principles that have little bearing on people’s actual lives, meanwhile it refuses to create laws that solve real, “common sense” problems. Here, it would make sense to grant the Oranienplatz participants legal residency as they’ve resided in the country so long already and have formed helpful and supportive communities, but the government refuses to do this, seemingly to make a political point about having zero tolerance for people who disrupt the peace.
Active
Themes
The lawyer pulls a book from his shelf and recites a passage from Tacitus’s Germania, about a host’s obligation to be hospitable to their guest. In antiquity, there was “no distinction […] between acquaintance and stranger.” That was then. Now, they have laws like the Residence Act. With this, the lawyer signals that the appointment is over: there are lots of asylum-seekers waiting in the hallway outside.
Active
Themes
