Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, “one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation” (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a routine existence until one day he spies some African refugees staging a hunger strike in … Alexanderplatz. Curiosity turns to compassion and an inner transformation, as he visits their shelter, interviews them, and becomes embroiled in their harrowing fates. Go, Went, Gone is a scathing indictment of Western policy toward the European refugee crisis, but also a touching portrait of a man who finds he has more in common with the Africans than he realizes. Exquisitely translated by Susan Bernofsky, Go, Went, Gone addresses one of the most pivotal issues of our time, facing it head-on in a voice that is both nostalgic and frightening.
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2018 has been a year of great books for me so far, and this one joins those at the top of my ‘Best Books So Far’ list. Richard, a widowed German classics professor who has recently retired, feels somewhat adrift, unsure of what purpose his life will have from here on out. He thinks about the wife that he cheated on and the lover who cheated on him; he putters around the house, plays his favorite music, thinks about the man who was lost in the lake behind his house and whose body was never retrieved. He does minimal shopping and prepares simple meals. He watches the news. Richard becomes intrigued by a story of ten dark-skinned refugees who have begun a hunger strike at the Alexanderplatz, a major square in Berlin. Their demonstration features a single sign: We become visible. Richard realizes that he must have passed them on his shopping trip just the day before. Why didn’t he see them?
In the following weeks, Richard scans the newspapers and TV for more reports of these men but finds nothing. He begins to realize how callous our society has become, scanning the images before us for their infinite variety rather than their content, rather than doing anything about the horrors that we see. He reads about a school in Kreuzberg occupied by a group of African refugees, and about a tent city another group has set up in Orianplatz. Moved by their plight and their passion, Richard determines to learn more about them and begins daily visits to speak with these men one-on-one. What he learns changes the way he views his government, changes his thoughts about refugees, and changes his life. Instead of being a viewer or reader, Richard becomes an active force for change.
Many of the topics Erpenbeck touches upon are not exclusive to Germany but relate to the immigrant situation throughout Europe and here in the US as well. People are worried for their jobs, concerned that the immigrants will eat up social welfare programs, or will bring an unrealistically feared religion and a strange culture to their country. The author also goes to lengths to demonstrate how a reunited Germany may not be so different from the divided country it was following the second World War. And the writing (and translation) here are exquisite, especially in revealing how Richard, a man who has lived the life of the mind, begins to realize the emotional power of the heart he had suppressed for so long.
“Must living in peace–so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world–inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?”
In short, this is a wonderful book. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
This is a book for our times. Its characters — not only the main protagonist — are memorable. They are black immigrants living in German refugee camps — African asylum seekers — shunted from Italy to Germany and back again from Niger, Libya, Ghana and other countries devastated by poverty and politics. We can’t help but be reminded of the Trump administration’s travel ban on such asylum seekers and its inhumane effects.
“Sometimes a journey can take you far away from home. It can take you far away from what you believe. From the only world you have ever known. And make you realize how much we are connected to each other. Also, how divided we can be.”
This paragraph came from my latest novel, Diondray’s Roundabout. The protagonist, Diondray Azur, reads a themily (a collection of thoughts written on a single sheet of paper meant to inspire, encourage or admonish the reader’s audience) to a huge crowd the city of Terrance set in the world of Kammbia. Diondray has traveled through the southern half of Kammbia and Terrance is the last stop of his journey. He realized that connection and division from people are two sides of a coin. Well, I thought this passage from my novel summed up how I felt when reading Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck.
Go, Went, Gone is the story of a retired German professor, Richard, who has settled into a comfortable retirement. However, he came across a hunger strike by African refugees in Berlin’s main square, Alexanderplatz. Richard became curious about these men and learned why these Africans staged this hunger strike.
Richard connected with several of the Africans and acknowledged he had a lot more of common with these men than he would have ever thought. There was one connection he made with a young man named Osarobo from Niger that grabbed my attention the most throughout the novel. Richard and Osarobo developed a bond from the love of the piano and a surprising twist from their connection near the end of the novel revealed how perilous any human relationship could be.
Erpenbeck challenges the politics of German immigration policy in this novel and shows through various characters the biases that first world people have towards those from third-world countries. Also, she does not shy away from the racism of Germans towards the African refugees.
However, I connected with this novel through Richard and his relationships with the refugees. He stepped out of his comfortable retirement and tried to do whatever he could to help these men and their tenuous situation in Berlin. This novel has made look at refugees and immigration in a new light in a similar fashion like Exit West by Moshin Hamid.
Gehen, Ging, Gegangen is one of my favorite reads (along with the first two books of The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham) of 2019 so far. Jenny Erpenbeck has written an important and timely novel that brings to mind Jesus’ words from the New Testament in Mark 12:31, “The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (ESV Bible). Highest Recommendation.
Excellent insights into the current refugee situation in Germany and comparison with Nazi Germany’s treatment of ‘others’. The main character, Richard, is a clever creation who guides us from innocence to understanding and compassion of their plight. Richard has personally lived through reunification and has experiences on both sides, East and West for comparison.
I stumbled onto Go, Went, Gone, a novel by Jenny Erpenbeck (and translated from German by Susan Bernofsky), thanks to a review in the New Yorker, and I’m so glad I did. The unassuming but important story dropped me into a world I’d heard about only on the news and made it personal, something fiction can do so well in the right hands.
The narrator, Richard, is a recently retired academic. He lives in Berlin, east of a wall that is no longer there. His wife has died, and retirement brings nothing but loneliness; “As of today, he has time—plain and simple.” A few pages later, we learn that “Richard really will have to be careful not to lose his marbles.” Trivial details paint a picture of a mind desperate for a new focus—a lawnmower blade sharpened, an unwavering breakfast and dinner routine—until his curiosity leads him to interview African asylum-seekers who are camped out on the Alexanderplatz, a square in the middle of Berlin.
Like Richard, the refugees want to work but can’t. They are stuck in a limbo caused by European Union law, which states that refugees can only work in the country where they first register. For these men, that’s Italy, where there are no jobs. Germany needs workers, but they are not allowed to register there.
As the story unfolds, Richard discovers more and more commonalities between himself and these men, despite all the superficial differences (country of origin, skin color, financial status). He also discovers how far apart their worlds are when he tries to explain to one of the men about the Berlin wall.
“Did you know that this used to be the East?”
Osarobo shakes his head. “East?”
Probably this isn’t the right way to ask this question when speaking to a person from Niger.
“Did you know that there used to be a wall in Berlin that separated one half of the city from the other?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
“It was built a few years after the war. Did you know there was a war here?”
“No.”
“A world war?”
“No.”
“Did you ever hear the name Hitler?”
“Who?”
“Hitler. He started the war and killed all the Jewish people.”
“He killed people?”
“Yes, he killed people—but only a few,” Richard says quickly, because he’s already feeling bad about getting carried away almost to the point of telling this boy, who’s just fled the slaughter in Libya, about slaughter that happened here. No, Richard, will never tell him that less than a lifetime ago, Germany systematically murdered so many human beings. All at once he feels deeply ashamed, as if this thing that everyone here in Europe knows is his own personal secret would be unreasonable to burden someone else with. And an instant later, just as forcefully, Richard is seized by the hope that this young man’s innocence might transport him once more to the Germany of before, to the land already lost forever by the time he was born.
I’ve added quote marks for clarity here, but the lack of them in the novel removes barriers between speech and thought. It’s easy to follow Richard’s rambling mind as it jumps from past to present and back again.
My only criticism is Richard’s obsession with a former lover, which doesn’t seem important to the story, but perhaps it is a way of showing Richard as flawed right from the beginning. All the characters are imperfect, but somehow hope shines through the quiet desperation and inhuman treatment of the immigrants’ lives. It is a peek into a Germany I had never seen before.
I’d also never heard of Jenny Erpenbeck, so now I’m going to seek out her previous books—if only for the inspiration to make every word and sentence and scene of my own books carry as much weight as her translated ones. As reviewer James Wood wrote in A Novelist’s Powerful Response to the Refugee Crisis, Erpenbeck’s “task is comprehension rather than replication, and she uses a measured, lyrically austere prose, whose even tread barely betrays the considerable passion that drives it onward. (Susan Bernofsky deserves immense credit for bringing this prose to us in English.)” Agreed.