Immigration, Escape, Exile: spatial and temporal Displacements of Gottfried and Amir in the novel ‘The idiot of the 21st century: a divan’, by Michael Kleeberg

Abstract

Our contribution aims at an analysis of the chapter “Gottfried and Amir”, of the novel The Idiot of the 21st Century: a Divan (title in German: Der Idiot des 21. Jahrhunderts: ein Divan) by the German writer Michael Kleeberg, published in August 2018. In that chapter, spatialities and temporalities involving the two characters − Gottfried and Amir − are fluid, so that spatial and temporal displacements are constructed from an unusual scene, much to the liking of fictional freedom: the dialogue between a nineteenth-century German immigrant and a twenty-first-century Syrian refugee. In a kind of mirroring of the trajectories, difficulties and misfortunes of these displaced persons, Michael Kleeberg offers the reader the opportunity to reflect on the migratory waves in full globalization under the aegis of capitalism, which, for many, implies traumatic experiences of immigration, escape and exile, in a “hyphenated” life, as he once posited the critic and theorist Anatol Rosenfeld.