As with Gogol

The story Wie bei Gogol by Siegfried Lenz dates from 1973 and was published in the anthology Einstein überquert der Elbe near Hamburg in 1975 .

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On the way to work, a young teacher drives his first used car into a man, a foreigner. He later learns that this was a Turkish guest worker . The injured person disappears from the scene of the accident, the teacher visits him to take care of his injury and comes into contact with the previously completely unknown world of - possibly illegal - foreign workers. The person concerned cannot speak German himself and the conversation is conducted by the teacher and a “man with a seal ring” on behalf of the injured person. The teacher finally handed over DM 750 for the repair of the car, which, however, only costs DM 550. When the teacher returns to the workers' quarters to return the rest of the money, no trace of the injured man can be found.

This story is one of the very few texts in local German-language literature that includes migrants.

The title of the story comes from the comment of a colleague to whom the teacher reports about the accident and the visit to the guest workers. The colleague sees in the incident the mere repetition of literary material and remarks: "As with Gogol". The allusion is not clarified by Siegfried Lenz, but probably applies to the famous story Newski Prospekt . In Gogol's text, the Russian lieutenant ties Pirogow to the wife of a German master locksmith, through which he comes into contact with her husband and with the world of German guest workers in Saint Petersburg .