Go, Went, Gone (2015, Gehen, ging, gegangen)
Novel (Original Language: German)
Jenny Erpenbeck
Introduced by Chunjie Zhang
Synopsis
Published in August 2015, Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel came out just a few days before German Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to keep the border to Austria open that allowed the refugees coming from Hungary to enter Germany. Nearly one million refugees entered Germany by the end of the year. Indeed, Erpenbeck’s novel addresses the issue of the refugees that has already existed in the German society and has intensified with the refugee crisis in 2015 until today. Go, Went, Gone narrates a story based on a refugee protest, the Oranienplatz movement, from October 2012 to April 2014 in the German capital city Berlin. Oranienplatz is a popular place in the district Kreuzberg in Berlin. The refugees, mostly from Africa, protested against the restrictive refugee policies and regulations in Germany. The novel describes the encounters and friendship stories between a German professor Richard and African refugees.
Landing at number 5 on the bestseller list of the German weekly Der Spiegel in September 2015 and shortlisted for the German Book Prize (Deutscher Buchpreis) in the same year, the novel is a significant contribution to the conjunction between the refugee problem and the decolonization discourse in contemporary German society. Erpenbeck’s novel renders the refugee problem not as an external problem that comes unexpectedly to Germany and the EU; rather the novel shows that Richard, as a representative of educated Germans, is in urgent need of decolonizing their often unconsciously racist and colonialist mindsets.
Key Quotes
“The word Kolonialwaren[laden] was still visible in weathered script on some East Berlin facades as recently as twenty years ago, until the West started renovating everything. Kolonialwaren[laden] and WWII bullet holes might adorn the very same storefront. (The dusty shop window of such a building—its tenants evicted to prepare for renovation—might also display a Socialist cardboard sign reading Obst Gemüse Speisekartoffeln (OGS) to advertise the ‘fruit, vegetable, and potatoes’ that gave East German greengrocers their acronym.) You can still find ‘German East Africa’ on the globe in his study.” (36-37, 2017)
Analysis: Richard’ s laconic memory effectively links together four significant epochs in German history of the long twentieth century: German colonialism and the Wilhelmine empire around 1900, the Second World War, the East German history and its socialist economy, and the present moment with refugees from war zones in Africa. The building monumentally exhibits an architectural memory of historical correlations in Berlin’ s changing urban environment. Germany’ s colonial past and the war memory are not only chronologically registered in time but spatially fused together in the edifice. Time is also space. History is also geography. The building as a multilayered site of memory does not merely function as a memorial to the past that is no longer pertinent. Rather, something more significant emerges. The signs of ‘German East Africa’ and ‘Colonial Products Store’ suggest that German colonial history is still haunting the present. Richard’ s old globe is a material object whose outdatedness indicates the lack of decolonization in the consciousness of
Richard and his generation more generally. The store selling colonial goods reveals the economic nature of the German colonial enterprise. Richard, a professor emeritus and a representative of the German educated elites (Bildungselite), has not fully come to terms with Germany’ s colonial past. The building with the historical memory is now silently witnessing the protest of the African refugees in the German capital. Accompanying the public protest of the African refugees, the faintly visible signs and bullet holes in the weathered façade subtly raise the issue of decolonization and its relevance to the current refugee problematic in Germany and Europe.
Publication and Translation
Jenny Erpenbeck (2015) Gehen, ging, gegangen. Munich: Knaus Verlag.
Jenny Erpenbeck (2017) Go, Went, Gone. Trans. S. Bernofsky. London: Portobello Books.
Further reading:
Chunjie Zhang, "Remembering Colonialism and Encountering Refugees: Decolonization in Jenny Erpenbeck's Go, Went, Gone," European Review (Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2020, later in an issue).