Didactical Guidelines for Experiences of Migration and Alterity as a Perception of The Foreign

Abstract

Jenny Erpenbeck's novel To go, Went, Gone a reading experience with students of German as a foreign language that addresses significant issues such as migration, strangeness and ethical writing. The author confronts the reader narratively with the current situation of refugees in Germany and shows an intercultural encounter between people, who, despite their foreignness and otherness, come closer and get to know each other. In this context, a multi-layered perception of the reader is also intended, which includes readiness to reflect on the relationship between the foreign and the own, and to learn about oneself. Therefore, the pedagogical role of migration literature is emphasized here, which should ultimately lead to self-reflection, when it critically deals with both the culturally foreign and one's own foreign. The learner as A reader is thus challenged to a change of perspective in many ways. The novel discussed here serves to address, from a didactic perspective, certain demands of the transcultural literary didactics in the light of theoretical positions of the current literary ethics. The article concludes with some didactic suggestions that can be certainly applied to other similar works.