4 ideas
The Berlin Senate agreement that cleared their camp promised each man an individual review of his case. In practice the reviews applied the Dublin rule that asylum must be claimed in the first EU country of entry, so most were told to return to Italy, where they had no means of survival.
A bureaucracy built on competence, meaning which office or country is responsible for a case, can process a person correctly at every step while no one is ever responsible for the person. Each authority checks only whether it is the right one, and passing the case on counts as a valid outcome. The result is a person who is lawfully handled everywhere and allowed to live nowhere.
Richard lost his country in 1990 without moving. The GDR's institutions, street names and professional standing dissolved around him, so borders and state legitimacy show up to him as historical accidents rather than natural facts. That experience lets him see the refugees' loss of home as the same kind of rupture as his own, differing in severity but not in kind. It also exposes how the new Germany demands from them the kind of belonging it once revoked from its own citizens.
Richard walks past the refugees' hunger strike at Alexanderplatz without registering it, and only notices through the news once retirement has emptied his schedule. Attention to other people's suffering depends less on compassion than on having time that is not already committed. Busy people are not callous so much as structurally unable to see. The refugees themselves are forbidden to work and must simply wait, so both parties are defined by empty time, one chosen and one imposed.