Go, Went, Gone as a strong work of nonfiction - but without much narrative engagement

In the last chapters of Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone (2015) we see the crisis of the African immigrants in Berlin build to a crescendo, as many of the refugees are deported against their will to Italy, others are treated w/ equal and weird hardship, such as confinement to a psychiatric ward, and we follow the protagonist, Richard, as he tries to help some of the refugees whom he's befriended, but we see the bureaucratic maze that confronts any attempt to get a hearing on the deportations - it's a real expose of the shameful conditions and hardships that African immigrants face and of the shameful laws that protect inland nations such as Germany from any responsibility for dealing with the refugee crisis. As a fictionalized piece of social history and as a powerful polemic, this novel excels. Where it falls short is in its literary aspirations; I thought it was a great idea to present the plight of the immigrants through the lens of an interested observer, Richard, who (like almost all American readers I would expect) starts with a sympathetic heart but no direct knowledge about the immigrants pouring into his city (Berlin) and gradually learns of their plight as he interview a # for what he calls a research project. At the end, when the crisis is at its peak, Richard goes to considerable length giving up his privacy, his space, and a lot of money to help several of the men he's befriended, and he does heroic work getting many of his German friends to do the same - even invoking the idea of atonement for the past sins of the nation. Would that it were all so easy! To JP's credit she does leave a few rough edges: Richard's house is vandalized and robbed, and the most likely perp is one of the refugees, though this is left open; one couple whom Richard had trusted make some crude and racist statements are refuse to offer help to the immigrants, and these folks are, sadly, probably more representative of the majority of Berliners of their age and status. What I miss, though, is any real sense of conflict, and drama that involves Richard himself and his evolving consciousness. Yes, he's a lens through which we see the story, but he's not opaque enough - by the end I felt I was reading a very good work of nonfiction, but without the narrative engagement that I was hoping for at the outset.