Go, Went, Gone

Jenny Erpenbeck was born in East Berlin. Her father was a physicist, philosopher, and writer, and her mother was a translator of Arabic. Following her graduation from high school, she apprenticed as a bookbinder and worked in theater as a props and wardrobe supervisor; she then studied theater at the Humboldt University of Berlin. After completing her university studies in 1994, she worked as an assistant director at the opera house in Graz and also did freelance directing work. Erpenbeck began her writing career in the 1990s, publishing her debut novella, Geschichte vom alten Kind (The Old Child) in 1999. In addition to several novels, she has also authored short story collections and several plays. Erpenbeck has received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the 2014 Hans Fallada Prize, the 2016 Thomas Mann Prize, and the 2015 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The English translation of her latest novel, Kairos (translation by Susan Bernofsky), was longlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2023. Erpenbeck lives in Berlin with her husband and son.

Go, Went, Gone was published at the height of the 2015 European refugee crisis, during which over one million people fled to Europe to request asylum—the highest number since World War II. Most asylum seekers were Syrians seeking to escape the country’s civil war, but a large percentage also came from African countries of Nigeria, Somalia, Gambia, and Senegal. (The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, which Go, Went, Gone indirectly references, has displaced over two million people since 2009 and accounted for around 75,000 requests for asylum in the EU during the refugee crisis.) The response to the massive influx of refugees varied among countries in the European Union, with many closing their borders. The Dublin Regulation, which is referenced in Go, Went, Gone, is a policy that outlines which EU country is responsible for reviewing a migrant’s case for asylum. The policy is primarily in place to prevent asylum seekers from submitting applications of asylum in multiple countries, and it states the country in which the asylum seeker first arrives is that which is responsible for granting or denying that individual asylum. The Dublin Regulation and its related laws were first established in 1997 at the Dublin Convention, with the Dublin II Regulation adopted in 2003. The policy was again amended in 2008, becoming the Dublin III Regulation. In 2023, Dublin III was replaced by the Asylum and Migration Management Regulation, which created a “solidarity mechanism” between member countries, theoretically allowing countries to more evenly share the cost of hosting migrants. These policies have been criticized for failing to adequately protect migrants as they undergo the asylum process. Meanwhile, the crisis has had a major sociopolitical impact on Europe, with anxiety over the influx of refugees leading to increased political polarization throughout the continent.

Erpenbeck has written several other novels in addition to Go, Went, Gone. Heimsuchung (Visitation) focuses on a single plot of land, telling the stories of the various people who have owned and occupied it throughout the 20th century.  Her latest novel, Kairos, follows a woman who has just learned that her former lover has died. The novel travels backward in time to tell the story of the couple’s romance, set against the backdrop of the final years of the GDR (East Germany) prior to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Go, Went, Gone focuses on Western Europe’s (and in particular Germany’s) response to the African refugee crisis, and it also touches on the wars, terrorism, and other political conflicts from which the novel’s refugee characters have fled. What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers is based on the life of a Sudanese refugee child who immigrated to the United States. It tells the story of young Achak, who witnesses a militia destroy his village during the Second Sudanese Civil War. The Return by Hisham Matar is a memoir about the Libyan novelist’s 2012 return to Libya to search for information about the whereabouts of his father, a prominent dissident of the Gaddafi regime who disappeared in 1990. The Ungrateful Refugee, a memoir by Dina Nayeri, tells the story of the author’s experience as a refugee—when she was a child, she and her family fled Iran and were granted asylum in America—alongside the stories of other refugees. Nayeri’s memoir sheds light on the challenges that refugee and asylum seekers experience and asks important questions about Western policy toward asylum seekers. Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal by Aviva Chomsky is another work of nonfiction that examines legal, political, and cultural conversations surrounding immigration and what it means to be “illegal,” focusing mainly on Mexican and Central American immigrants.