Remembering Colonialism and Encountering Refugees: Decolonization in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

This article reads the German writer Jenny Erpenbeckʼs influential novel Go, Went, Gone (2015) as a significant contribution to connecting the current refugee problematic to the decolonization discourse in the German and European public sphere. Along with the public discussions about looted art objects during German colonialism in existing German museums and the emerging Humboldt Forum, the novel registers a shift in the culture of collective memory from a singular focus on the holocaust toward a more inclusive and more connected memory of multiple pasts of violence and atrocity, including German colonialism. This multilayered memory reveals the refugee problem not as something external and unexpected but as something that is deeply connected to German and European history. The novelʼs protagonist Richard, an educated former East German, is the novelistʼs experiment to articulate the urgent need for decolonization as a possible solution toward the refugee problematic. The novel depicts the reality and imagines a decolonized world in which less discrimination, less exclusion, more hospitality, and more acceptance might be possible.