Go, Went, Gone

Name: Go, Went, Gone
Author: Jenny Erpenbeck

Jenny Erpenbeck · b. 1967 · Germany

Originally Gehen, ging, gegangen (German) · translated by Susan Bernofsky

Why it matters

A retired East Berlin classics professor grows entangled in the lives of African refugees camped in his newly reunified city. Erpenbeck turns bureaucratic indifference into the novel's real antagonist.

At a glance

political novelpsychological novel

Difficulty 5/10medium pace320 pages

Clear prose, but bureaucratic documentation is woven throughout deliberately.

More by Jenny Erpenbeck →

Deep dive

A retired East Berlin classics professor, once a citizen of a country that dissolved overnight, starts interviewing African refugees camped in his newly reunified city — and finds his professional distance from their bureaucratic limbo harder to keep than he expected.

Written for readers who have finished the book. No plot recap, and nothing here is safe to read first.

Themes & symbolism

Erpenbeck builds her real antagonist out of paperwork: the Dublin Regulation and its Kafkaesque German administration trap the men Richard meets in a limbo where they can't legally work, can't claim asylum because they first set foot in Italy, and can't be deported either — a system that determines survival while remaining totally indifferent to the human lives it processes. Richard's own history supplies the novel's quietest, most exact parallel without ever equating the two experiences: as an East German whose entire state vanished in 1989, he too was once administratively reclassified, his citizenship and legal footing dissolved by decree rather than choice, which is precisely why he recognizes what bureaucratic non-existence costs even as he starts out treating the men as research subjects rather than people.

His scholarly specialty, Ovid's Metamorphoses, becomes an unexpectedly literal lens rather than a decorative one: a text obsessed with identity in enforced flux turns out to describe, better than any policy document could, what it means to have your whole legal and personal self a matter of shifting categories rather than settled fact. The novel's method throughout is to let Richard's academic training — interviewing, note-taking, translating — start as a way of keeping the men at a safe intellectual distance and gradually fail to do that job.

Bureaucracy as the Real Villain

Erpenbeck stages her critique almost entirely through documents and procedure rather than individual cruelty — case workers, regulations, and forms recur as the novel's true obstacles, more implacable than any character. That choice makes the book's politics land with unusual precision: there is no single villain to defeat, only a system that nobody inside it, refugee or bureaucrat, seems able to see whole.

Two Germanys, One Indifference

Erpenbeck, who grew up in East Berlin before reunification, gives Richard a biography close to her own generation's, and uses his memory of one German state's overnight dissolution to needle at reunified Germany's confidence that its current order is simply how things are. The men Richard meets are stuck in exactly the kind of administrative non-status his own country's citizens briefly occupied in 1990 — proof, in the novel's quiet argument, that statelessness isn't a foreign problem happening to foreign people, just one Germany has already lived through once and preferred to forget.

The last seal: what actually happens, and why it lands the way it does.