The States of Memory: National Narratives of Belonging, the Refugee Novel, and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone

Published at the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Gehen, ging, gegangen (Go, Went, Gone) posits a new German national narrative for the age of migration. Detailing state bureaucracies and how they thwart the characters’ futures, the novel depicts conflicts between official narratives and personal memory that expose state power over representations of the past. The novel expands the German memory regime by incorporating migrant memories into national ones, connecting past Holocaust victims and Silesian expellees to present African and Muslim refugees and establishing all as fundamental to the nation’s long history of migration.